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I

APROPOS

OF

DOLORES

MR. WELLS

has also written the following novels

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS

TONO-BUNGAY

ANN VERONICA

THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

MARRIAGE

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER

THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART
CHRISTINA alberta’s FATHER
THE WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD
MEANWHILE

THE BULPINGTON OF BLUP
BRYNHILD

BEALBY

T'he following Fantastic and Imaginative Romances

THE TIME MACHINE

THE WONDERFUL VISIT

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

THE INVISIBLE MAN

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

THE SLEEPER AWAKES

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

THE SEA LADY

THE FOOD OF THE GODS

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET

THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE WORLD SET FREE
THE UNDYING FIRE
MEN LIKE GODS
THE DREAM

MR. BLETTS WORTHY ON RAMPOLE ISLAND
THE KING WHO WAS A KING
THE AUTOCRACY OF MR. PARHAM
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Numerous Short Stories collected under the following titles

THE STOLEN BACILLUS TALES OF SPACE AND TIME

THE PLATTNER STORY TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM

The same short stories will also be found collected in one volume under
the title, the short stories of h. g. wells, which also contains

THE TIME MACHINE

And four long-short stories entitled

THE CROIJUET PLAYER
STAR- BEGOTTEN

THE BROTHERS

THE CAMFORD VISITATION

H. G. WELI^

APROPOS

OF

DOLORES

JONATHAN CAPE
THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON

PliaST PUBLISHED, 1958

JONATHAN CAPE LTD. 50 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON
AND 91 WELUNOTON STREET WEST, TORONTO

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CITY OF OXFORD
AT THE ALDEN PRESS
PAPER MADE BY SPALDING & HODGE LTD.
BOUND BY A. W. BAIN & CO. LTD.

CONTENTS

I

HAPPY INTERLUDE

11

II

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

28

III

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

69

IV

DOLORES AT TORQUiSTOL

126

V

THRENODY

254

VI

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

270

vn

RETURN TO EVERYDAY

331

5

PREFATORY NOTE

Every character and every event in this novel is
fictitious, and any coincidence with the name or conduct
or circumstance of any living person is unintentional.
In this repudiation the author must include himself.
The story is told in the first person but the voice is
the voice of an invented personality - however lifelike
and self-conscious it may seem. Never will the author
proceed against his publisher for libel. He has no
plaim. Stephen Wilbeck is no more an auto-libel on
the present writer than Tristram Shandy was an auto-
libel on Laurence Sterne. Sterne knew his Tristram
was different and meant him to be different, not only
in circumstances but in quality, and that is the case
with the author of every novel told in the first person.

And so if the views and opinions of Stephen Wil-
beck annoy you do not fly into a rage with the writer.

Yet let us not go too far with these now customary
disavow^als. Every proper novel is judged by its reality
and is designed to display life^ it must present real life
and real incidents and not life and incidents taken
from other books ^ it should not, therefore, be anything
but experience, observation, good hearsay and original
thought, disarticulated and rearranged. You take bits
from this person and bits from that, from a friend you
have known for a lifetime or from someone you over-
heard upon a railway platform while waiting for a

7

PREFATORY NOTE

train or from some odd phrase or thing reported in a
newspaper. That is the way fiction is made and there
is no other way. If a character in a book should have
the luck to seem like a real human being that is no
excuse for imagining an 'originaF or suspecting a
caricature. This is a story about happiness and about
loneliness oFipKETtold in good faith. Nothing in this
book has happened to anyone 5 much in this book has
happened to many people.

H. G. Wells

8

APROPOS

OF

DOLORES

CHAPTER 1

HAPPY INTERLUDE
{Portumere^ August 2 nd^ 1934)

§1

I FIND myself happy and I have an impression that I
have been quite happy for two days. And further I
believe against the critical protests of my intelligence,
that I have been generally happy throughout my life.

My intelligence does not deny flatly that this is
so, but it demands an inquiry into the matter. It
produces memories as disputing politicians exhume
the past speeches of their adversaries. It raises this
question with the faintly irritating air of entire
impartiality. Will I explain? Quite recently, within
the last fortnight, there was a mood when the years
that lay before me presented themselves as a burthen
too heavy to be borne, I saw my life as an inextricable
muddle, and I repudiated suicide perhaps because it
presented itself as an effort too troublesome to attempt,
or perhaps, and so I remember I preferred to put it,
because I was under obligation to various people who
had stood by me and might be in a manner depending
on me, not to confess that the life they had thought
worth-while and found some comfort in, was a failure.

I still, after much disillusionment, cling to the

11

APROPOS OF DOLORES

belief that such fluctuations of mood as this ought to
be more controllable than I find them. There has
been no change in my circumstances to justify this vast
contrast of feeling - indeed there has been no estimable
change at all. I cannot say that I was either better off
or worse off in any way during that dismal night. But
that was three nights ago. And here amazingly I am
back at contentment, finding the life in me and the
things about me very good, and very gladly would I
remain in this mood for the rest of my life.

As I run over the details of these two past agreeable
days in my mind - these days that contrast so vividly
with my night of depression - 1 am reminded more
and more of the personality of Mr. Jame s B oswel l. I
perceive that for a while I have been going about
with much the same appreciative gusto, my mental
eyes protruding. I have been living objectively. I
have been extroverted. I have a Boswell self, I reahze,
and it is beyond doubt the happiest of all my selves.
If I may bend a phrase from the spiritualists to my
purpose, these last two days Boswell has been my
control. Since I left Paris the day before yesterday my
mind has made a thousand grateful notes, quite in the
Boswell fashion, of the gestures of this great, slovenly,
incoherent, foolishly wise, liberally disposed Tory Dr.
Johnson of a world. I have kept myself and my own
concerns not so much in the background as in their
proper Boswellian place, inconspicuously in the fore-
ground. I have been hardly more than where the
camera happened to be in the spectacle.

12

HAPPY INTERLUDE

I have caught myself under this Boswell influence
before. In Paris, in London I have been a happy
flaneur 3 I have fllin^-d in New York and Washington
and most of the great cities of Europe 5 but for some
time I have been too preoccupied and too vexed for it,
and never before have I been so conscious of the flaneur
state of mind.

This pleasant escape to an all too infrequent mood
culminated recognizably in the city of Rennes in the
afternoon of the first day. I had left Paris a little before
nine, and except that one of the brakes heated and
smoked and had to be relieved at Verneuil, my little
Voisin Fourteen had behaved beautifully on the road,
passing everything without any appearance of hurry
or competition, honking modestly and meekly, ‘please’,
never making an unnecessary sound. Auguste had
cleaned all the bougies and greased and oiled every-
thing to perfection. It was not his fault that one of the
brakes was just the slightest bit too tight. Dolores
in a wrapper, by a great and obvious effort controlling
her morbid affection for me to an only slightly un-
reasonable solicitude, had repeated her last unnecessary
directions from the balcony. I was to be sure and do
something - 1 didn’t catch what, but I promised.
Probably not to go too fast. But what is too fast? I
couldn’t go too fast away from Paris.

I had liked the man at the barrier who handed me
my green ticket - my Voisin has a right-hand drive
and we both had short arms and we thought it funny
rather than annoying that we had to stretch to the

13

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Utmost - and I had liked the two young men who
filled up my tank outside Sfevres - I don’t know why.
One had a green and pink jumper and the other a
crooked nose; perhaps it was that.

I was amused to hnd the pale old-fashioned majesty
of Versailles set out, as it seemed, specially to adorn my
progress and fading visibly in the sunlight. Mile after
mile along the good straight western road a golden
carpet of sunshine had been laid down for me, patterned
with tree shadows; the fields were decorated with
wheatsheafs regardless of expense, millions-worth of
wheatsheafs; and the man at Venieuil who had come
across the road to tell me my wheel was afire seemed
like a guardian angel rather than a garagist.

He fixed it while I drank at the cafd across the way
and I lunched in Alen§on on mutton and beer (avoid-
ing the t6te de veau) and got to Rennes between four
and five, making my way to the Hotel Moderne, whose
name I found congenial, with unerring precision by
means of the Michelin plan.

At one corner by a bridge over the Vilaine as I
drove along the Quai I was stopped by a very good-
looking police agent. I go in great fear of police agents
and at the first movement of his white truncheon I
pulled up and prepared to accept whatever contraven-
tion he thrust upon me. But he came to the side all
apologetic smiles. He had thought M’sieu had no
number in front but it was the dazzle of the sunshine
had blinded him. He motioned me on, and I and the
Voisin bowing radiantly went our way.

14

HAPPY INTERLUDE

Everything was like that.

The Hotel Moderne was not excessive in its
modernity but at least it could satisfy my craving to be
master in my own bathroom^ its staff was the youngest,
most easily reduced to giggling or panic you can
imagine, and its garage mechanic was an old lady in a
black bonnet. Does she put on blue overalls when
there is work afoot? Happily there was no work afoot.
I had some tea, put on a collar and tie, and so adjusted
to urban conditions, went out to see Rennes.

It is hard to explain, though I myself comprehend
perfectly, why Rennes should have presented itself as
a compendium of human contentment that evening,
or why it was there and then that I conceded final
complete recognition to the value of the Boswell in
my composition. It came upon me with overwhelming
force that to live most of the hours of the waking life
Boswell fashion is the only sane and pleasant way of
living. All sorts of problems and perplexities floating
in my mind or lurking unformulated in the deeps
beneath my mind, seemed to come together in that
solution. ‘One must be amused, one must be detached,
one must be at peace within.’

I said it over several times. I even thought of
making a new Lord’s prayer about it. Give us this
day our daily bread and anything else you like but
make us Boswell about it; morning, noon and night,
keep us extroverts and let us not think of the dark
questions on the inside of things. . . .

15

APROPOS OF DOLORES

§2

Rennes has the air of being a very completed place.
It is unhurried and satisfied with itself. It has the
unemphatic calm of an aquatint. Like all the rest of
this planet it is rushing through space at so many
thousands of miles a minute, and through time and
change with an even more terrible velocity. But it
does not know it. It was making no more fuss about
it than a dog sleeping in the sun. I went to the Place
de la Rdpublique to send a telegram assuring Dolores
that I was not a burnt-out collision by the roadside; it
is her invariable imagination when I go out of her
sight in a car; ‘tendresse’ I put in as is our custom;
and then I took a turn round the town. It is mainly
an eighteenth-century town I should think, with some
pleasing islands of old houses that may date from a
century or so earlier; there are plenty of bright little
shops offering nice things to eat and drink; and all the
boot shops and clothing shops seem to have got to-
gether in a struggling principal street with a new alias
every time it takes a turn, a street that is not so much
busy as narrow enough to make a traffic jam out of two
old ladies and a donkey cart. There are quite a large
number of stately, grey- white buildings with gateways
and fine lamps, which may be convents or museums or
art galleries or faculties and schools for this or that.
There is probably a university. I saw no undergrad-
uates, perhaps they were on vacation, but I understand

i6

HAPPY INTERLUDE

that here learned men dig continually into the
mysteries of Celtic, producing mounds of excavated
futilities to replace the Arthurian legends of the more
poetic past. If there are no undergraduates there are
plenty of cherubic young soldiers in horizon blue who*
look infinitely distant from any modern warfare, as
indeed I hope with all my heart they always will be..
There is nothing more alien to modern warfare than a
garrison town in France.

The cathedral is none of your Gothic petrifactions
of mystery and aspiration streaming up to heaven.
It lives entirely in the town and is unaffectedly homely^
God alone, to whose glory it was erected, knows what
conceptions of style were in the hearts of its builders.
Near by it I came upon two old ladies who pleased me
greatly. The fauna of Rennes is particularly rich in
this form of feminity and, could I draw, I would gladly
spend a few weeks collecting, classifying and preparing
an album, Harem siccus, of the various types. An old
woman is evidently the last thing Rennes eliminatea.

These two were both in black with hats long since
subdued to their personalities. One was authoritative y
she wore spectacles and spoke down her nose, she
leant her head sideways with a critical poise, holding
her hands behind her back and keeping her feet apart.
The other was short, fat and submissive with a rotund
stomach and folded hands and feet. What she had to
say, she said like a born Catholic’s prayer, low and very
very quick, snatching her breath at rare intervals. They
were so like two ecclesiastics that for some moments I

B 17

APROPOS OF DOLORES

doubted my own powers of observation. I walked
round theta unobtrusively. But I am sure they were
old ladies and, I realized more and more clearly, the
housekeepers of church dignitaries who had acquired
a style from their employers. The short one was
■certainly feminine j she had a basket and a key on one
arm. She bubbled up remarks, used ‘Madame’
continually, and the other one scrutinized her and
jetted occasional replies. I left them reluctantly, for
I felt that if my attention was remarked it might be
misunderstood - you never know what the French will
impute to a travelling Englishman — and I continued
my exploration of the town.

There was a spacious, bright Jardin des Plantes
with nice unhurried-looking people sitting about, more
old ladies in lovely white caps, and children playing
and being reproved, and various of those rotund groups
■of sculptures just for the sake of sculpture, all breasts
and thighs and bottoms and sprawl, with which France
abounds. There was a Renaissance Palais de Justice
that was once a Parliament House, and outside it were
the heroic presentations of four immortals of whom I
had never heard before, D’Argentrd, La Chalotais,
Toullier and Gerbier. I wrote their names down. I
wonder what they did for me. They looked as great as
any other great men. They had an air of being very
comfortably settled in life and they all had double chins.
And there was an Hotel de Ville adorned with a vast
bronze affair of swirling feminine figures that might
symbolize almost anything. The waiter in the cafd of

i8

HAPPY INTERLUDE

the theatre opposite told me that so far it has symbol-
ized the union of Brittany and France through some
dynastic marriage, the union with which this present
millennium began.

Millennial is surely the best word for the atmo-
sphere of Rennes. The stirring tide of history ebbed
with the revolutionary wars and ended with a few
executions. Nothing has happened since. It is far out
of the world. It is three hundred and forty-six
kilometres from Paris; three hundred and forty-six
kilometres from everywhere. It is on the road to
Finisterre, which is as much as to say nowhere at all.
Sons have radiated away to the sea and colonies and
wars, after the manner of sons among peoples that
still increase and multiply, many have been killed and
few have returned, but that has not torn out the heart
of Rennes. If it were not for those boys in horizon
blue there would be a shortage of men here and it
would disarrange nothing. The place is sleeping with
an effect of quiet satisfaction, like a humming top that
has done with its whipping and does not yet begin to
wabble.

These millennial interludes make the less accentu-
ated spaces of history, and life is very kindly in them.
Human beings take heart and begin to be humorous
and tolerant and gently entertaining. Tragedy be-
comes queer and unaccountable. Old ladies sit as
custodians in the museums and do not believe in
history a bit. Old ladies gossip in the sunlight and
drop their voices so that the children shall not hear too

»9

APROPOS OF DOLORES

soon of the only things that matter. People do not
worry at large. It must have been like this in the less
industrialized parts of England during the intermin-
able years of Queen Victoria.

It was the Boer War that gave our British content-
ment the first plain intimations of a wabble. In 1914
jhe wabbles became violent, and now, now the whole
universe is reeling about us. Even for the British, the
impassive Tory British, the universe is reeling. They
know it though they hate to admit it by word or act.
But Rennes, I see, has still to notice it. Rennes is
genuine pre-war still. My years in the trenches seem
like a dream here.

As the shadows lengthened in these healing grey
streets my mind turned to the thought of dinner.
I drifted to the cafd over against the Hotel de Ville.

The Hotel de Ville is concave like the London
County Hall 5 the theatre has a bulge to correspond^
the cafd is in the bulge j in my happy mood this minor
agreement also gave me pleasure. The Place de la
Mairie is the space between, and it would certainly be
obliterated entirely and exactly if by any convulsion
of nature the two buildings came together. Trivial
little trams have their rendezvous in this space and I
watched a diversity of pleasant people carrying bags,
baskets, portfolios, sticks, umbrellas, their own hats,
and other objects, choose gravely between this tram
and that, though it did not seem to me to be of the
slightest importance which tram anyone took.

A very young soldier had found this place, which

20

HAPPY INTERLUDE

abounds in cobbles and stray pebbles and is occasionally
traversed by meteoric motor cars, suitable for the
instruction of a stout young lady in the art of riding a
bicycle $ and two or three dogs, a newspaper vendor
and a municipal but futile street-cleaner went about
their various affairs. Outside the cafd two waiters in
white aprons became active spreading out chairs and
tables and erecting barriers for one of those open-air
cinema shows without which no summer evening in a
French provincial town is complete.

Forgetting those three hundred and forty-six
kilometres between Rennes and Paris I ordered a dry
martini cocktail and was properly rewarded with a
small tumblerful of warmish mixture in which
Cinzano and ginger were the most evident ingredients.

(Yet after all why should not one have ginger in
cocktails and warm them up a bit?)

I was so pleased with this cocktail which I sat and
admired rather than consumed, abandoning it in the
end as if inadvertently, that I dined in the restaurant
within. There was a delightful waiter who lit a red-
shaded table lamp in full daylight because it was more
gai for M’sieu, but beyond that were no surprises. I
forget about the dinner^ I am sure it was quite a good
dinner and that being in Brittany, there was lobster in
it somewhere. I returned to the open air and the now
imminent cinema show for coffee.

When the film began and revealed itself as a flicker-
ing patched-up old American film about vamps,
virtuous toughs, crime and that detestable rich young

21

APROPOS OF DOLORES

man of New York with a resolute jowl and a heart of
gold, I went away quietly and found another cafd on
the Vilaine where three men and two women were
playing excellent music, and there I pretended to
consume an ardent cognac which secretly, after the
perfect example of Sir Philip Sidney, I gave to a box of
privet whose need for it certainly looked greater than
mine. I watched little men come in importantly and
greet the waiters magisterially, and men with their
womenfolk chosing with infinite care and wariness
tables that were exactly like all the other tables, and
young men posing Byronically, and a very stylish
desperate young man with a large dog, and three
peasants with a secret business in hand and their heads
all close together, and a whore or so, not unaware of the
lonely man in the corner and quite unaware of my
loyalty and devotion to Dolores.

For Dolores, about whom I shall presently begin
telling you, is enough woman for any reasonable man.

One of these girls was not at all ill-looking. How
localized types still remain in our world in spite of all
our transport! She might have sat as model for the
bronze Brittany outside the H6tel de Ville. Maybe
some great-great-grandmother did. Rennes seemed to
look at me with inquiry and invitation through her
eyes. But my adamantine virtue was proof against the
friendliness in her face. I affected to lose all interest in
her. I withdrew into my own thoughts.

22

HAPPY INTERLUDE

§3

All the while beneath the receipt and appreciation
of these superficial events I was going on with a train
of ideas that had arisen almost imperceptibly during
the day and which was becoming more and more
interesting to me, about happiness, about why I was
happy, why so often I am not happy, why I am often
angry and ungracious, why many people I care for
and particularly just now Dolores whom by all reckon-
ing I love, are frequently and abundantly unhappy,
why I in particular hurt and wound people and indeed
a whole anatomy of gladness and melancholy, gather-*
ing itself together with a sort of lazy activity out of
the miscellaneous activities of my mind.

This train of thought which began to assemble in
Rennes has been picking up passengers ever since. It
has been picking up luggage and material, and indeed
to keep on the metaphor, has been adding trucks and
vans and wagon-lit cars to itself for some days, shunting
into sidings, encountering breakdowns and collisions^
making sudden runs into new country and generally
proving so entertaining that I am setting myself to
write some of it down before it runs abruptly into some
terminus and gets itself broken up and dispersed as all
my trains of thought are apt to do. And since it is
about my journey in this train, wherever it takes me,
that I am going to write and not of my tour in Brittany,

23

APROPOS OF DOLORES

I will not describe my second happy day with even so
much particularity as I have given the first.

All the morning I spent in a search for some
tranquil, simple but extremely comfortable place
where Dolores may rest her weary nerves and body
and her tormented soul. I came through Miir-de-
Bretagne and by Bon-Repos, Rostrenen and Carhaix
to Torquestol, and except that coming out of Rennes
in the briskness of the morning I raced, sinfully and
triumphantly, two very very young, very very hatiess,
very open-necked young men in a vast blue car — be-
cause they came up yonking impertinently behind me
along the road to St. Brieuc, with every advantage on
their side, colour, beauty, youth, everything indeed
except good brakes and horse power - racing them until
I was dust in their distant prospect and had lost and
forgotten them altogether, I devoted myself entirely
to seeking out and interviewing the proprietors and
directors of pensions, hotels and lodgings with a view
to Dolores’ comfort, peace and satisfaction. All turned
their best sides to me at once, while they calculated
rapidly what might be the maximum prices a mad
Englishman with an invalid wife, her maid, a pet
dog, a car and a chauffeur, and a limitless appetite for
bathrooms, would pay for a merely apparent approxi-
mation to his fantastic requirements and what would
be the minimum to frighten him off, and I was able to
observe them and their accommodation without dis-
traction while they were thus preoccupied.

Three or four charming places I found, quite full

24

HAPPY INTERLUDE

up but loth to refuse so tempting a feast of profit as I
promised to be. They clung to me and it seemed
easiest to let them cling for a bit. They lied to me,
they pretended to me, they wheedled me, they
charmed me and I did nothing to prevent them. I was
particularly astonished by a deeply religious pension, I
forget exactly where, with a sort of shrine to the
Virgin upon a bracket in every room and, as the
proprietress insisted - though I don’t know why she
should have repeated it four times - a water-closet on
each half-landing. Perhaps because there were four
half-landings and she was short of breath and found it
nice to pause and open a door and have something to
display. If it had been a skyscraper I should certainly
have had a glut of water-closets, more than I could
have ever used except upon a most exacting system.
It was a family pension, the signs and sounds of chil-
dren were abundant^ evidently they were children
accustomed to live frankly, controversially and at the
tops of their voices, with their elders. The board out-
side proclaimed tennis and a pare. The ‘tennis’ - it
was the first of an extremely interesting series I have
viewed in Britanny - was an expanse of unrolled
gravel amidst which children digging for treasure had
left a pail and a spade, and as for the pare — ! Where,
I asked, was the pare?

The arm of the proprietress went from the tennis
by way of the hens about our feet to the washing under
the trees. Beyond the washing a docile young priest
sat on an iron seat controlling his thoughts with a little

*5

APROPOS OF DOLORES

book amidst a confused playings screaming and hulla-
baloo of the offspring of less cehbate pensionnaires.
That was the ‘pare’.

And in the matter of baths? Whenever M’sieu
wished he could have a bath. Where? Wherever he
wished. Brave little proprietress! How rarely in any
country can one have baths for the wishing!

At Torqu^stol at last I found clean and seemly
rooms vacant, giving on a pleasant view, and a credible
visible bathroom with a definite position where one
might count on finding it again and which could be
monopolized for our use^ it had taps and I tried them
and they ran and the hot one was hot. I chose with
very great care the very quietest rooms for Dolores
and other less meticulously for myself, Bayard and the
rest of our household, arranged for the detached
proximity of Auguste and the housing of the large
impressive blue car of Dolores beside my smaller but
speedier own, and my mission thus accomplished I
lunched and then I spent my afternoon finding my
way through a maze of minor roads, erratic deaf cows
and helpful-spirited but incomprehensible peasants to
Portumere, where I had occasion to talk to my friend
Foxfield who is writing a book for my firm upon the
biology of insects.

It was a difficult but not impossible cross-country
journey. I won the toss at most of the turnings but I
got into one nasty lane between wet ditches, from
which I had to back for the worst half of a kilometre.
It left me cheerful. My cheerfulness remained even

26

HAPPY INTERLUDE

after it had occurred to me that I wanted tea ~
though commonly the tea craving makes a devil of me.
I arrived practically unruffled in spite of the fact that I
had had a puncture near Belle-Isle-en-Terre and had
changed my wheel so smartly and rapidly and with so
bright a consciousness of my briskness that I had left
the nice little rubber mat I took out of my car to kneel
upon, abandoned on the highway.

a?

CHAPTER II

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY
{Torquestol^ August 6 th, 1934)

§1

I FEEL there is going to be a change of key in what I am
writing. Do what I can, I am not the extrovert I was
during those first blessed days of release from Paris
and my personal bothers. And the style will follow
the mood. That Boswellian appreciativeness is no
common phase with me^ I cannot, as the movie direc-
tors say, ‘hold it’, gladly as I wouldj and here I am,
hour by hour and line by line, subsiding towards my
more habitual level, a line at which I think and plan,
and am only intermittently attentive to the irrelevant
things about me.

It is no good pretending to be amused when one is
preoccupied. The reader, if he or she is the sort of
reader I like, would see through that at once^ you
must take me as you find me.

My thoughts are no longer untrammelled. During
the five days I spent with Foxfield at Portumere this
gallant proposition of mine that life is on the whole
happy was put through a very severe critical examin-
ation. Second thoughts may be best but they are rarely

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

gayest. The idea had presented itself to me at Rennes
with an air of such illuminating discovery that I
demanded no credentials. I w^as pervaded by surprise
that I had never observed it before. Hitherto it had
been screened, I supposed, by an assumption that
happiness was a rare light on a process largely dull or
distressful.

Why had I allowed that assumption to stand in my
way for so long? It was not, I felt, in the least true.
In what manner had it got itself established in my
mind? Happiness is the manifest rule of life. And so
on, and so on - right ahead with it.^* '

But Foxfield speedily destroyed that first, that
almost blinding, vividness of realization, and brought
my discovery down to the level of a merely alleged
discovery. He debated it as a still open question.

Scenery and talk intermingle in my memory. I
like this Brittany. It is new country to me and newer
to me than I expected any region could ever be again.
No other scenery in the rest of my known world has the
same firm yet gentle and clear and entirely distinctive
green and grey lucidity. There is no crowding and no
confusion. Finisterre is the appropriate name for it.
There is definition and finality. Here things have come
to a sort of conclusion. The world may go on else-
where, endlessly, but not here. Here enduring granite
meets the incessant sea and there is nothing more to be
done about it.

Everything is here that tastes most human, from
faith to fairyland 5 the gentle, solemn men have long

^9

APROPOS OF DOLORES

silly ribbons hanging from their big black hats and
the women wear costumes like our Elizabethan
ancestresses; they know these are the right things
to wear and so they go on wearing them inflexibly.
Their faith is a marvellous thing. They not only
believe in the Roman Catholic Church and its priests,
lock, stock and barrel, but also in all their pre-Christian
gods and goddesses, dressed up as saints, wizards,
warlocks and fairy folk according to their tempera-
mental quality. They believe in superstitions more
than anyone can tell, they believe in charms and they
believe in patent medicines and that the way they live
will endure for ever.

My memories of Portumere are of countless rocky
headlands and islands stretching out one beyond the
other to the horizon, of blue channels, bays, pools and
races of water, viewed nakedly, or viewed between the
stems of intense green trees and as a background to
grey-white houses and intricate carven church spires,
of excursions to special points of vantage to see this
wonderful Breton coast higher and farther, and of walks
over weedy tidal rocks encrusted with limpets, barnacles
and an abundance of such passive creatures, of fine
sands with the shrimps flying almost invisibly and of
menacing little crabs scuttling aside from my feet,
and all the time that now questioned assertion of the
prevalence of happiness imposed itself upon these
immediate things and Foxfield dominated the dis-
cussion and the scene.

We strolled and we motored, but not very far. The

30

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

Strolling stays most in my mind because then it was
the better part of the talking was done. We made
excursions in my automobile along incredibly narrow
lanes and picnicked. We visited a Pardon, which is a
sort of annual Major Sabbath, a gathering rather than
a festival. And we played tennis not to exhibit or
perfect our skill but as the humble instruments of
Providence.

There were three tennis courts in Portumere and
we experienced them all. They are earth courts, of
good red earth. Adamitic. One was marked out by
deep furrows and as one player complained, there was
^trop de salade’^ another was divided up by wooden
strips, once level but now by reason of the wearing
down of the surrounding earth, rising some inches
above the general surface and so adding an element
of danger to the general uncertainty 5 and the third,
more level, had no perceptible lines marked out at all.
The latter two courts were enclosed in netting like
hen-runs through which large hens had burst at
innumerable points, but the former was set in a
receptive shrubbery. Tennis under such circum-
stances must either be generous and genial or delirious,
suspicious and very bitter. We made it a function
rather than a game and threw sidelights upon our
discussion to one another while we hunted for five of
the most ruse tennis balls I have ever known. They
were tinted brick red and green and like so many of
the lower animals they changed colour according to
their surroundings.

31

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Foxfield had found and made a circle of friends in
this place, French, American and English scattered
among hired houses and pensions, and he was, I began
to fear, dissipating in talk very much that he ought
to have been writing down for my firm. A distin-
guished figure in the literature of France lives here$
his description of a date palm at sunset is said to be
one of the finest pieces of French prose ever written 5
he and his family were away and as a publisher who
never forgets his mission I was sorry to miss them in
general and him in particular, but there was a pleasant
little pavilion amidst trees in the great man’s garden
which he had given Foxfield permission to use. Thither
Foxfield, when he was not swimming, going for
excursions, playing tennis, eating, sleeping or talking,
would, I understood, resort and write my book. On
the one occasion when I visited it the chief evidences
of activity were two pipes in process of cleaning with
feather and straws, the debris of a desperate struggle
with a fountain pen and a number of the less known
romances of Alexandre Dumas.

Foxfield is one of my discoveries. It is up to me to
justify him to my partners. They are a good set, but I
hate to think there are criticisms they have to keep at
the backs of their minds. Young Clews, I know, feels
I have ideals and that he thinks is bad for a publishing
business. He thinks I want the business to spread too
wide and go too fast. He has never been reconciled to
my living in France. I hate to bother Foxfield but still
he must realize that I must make good with him. He

3a

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

is a big red talkative mouth with a vast fuzz of
brindled black and grey hair, he looks at you through
his spectacles like the lamps of a big car coming at you
fast and rather out of control, and his voice is a rich
continuum 5 I mean it flows along between words as
well as in them, there is a lot of word material, so to
speak, not made up into words, a richness, an inter-
calary hum rather like the drone of the bagpipes ^ but
he knows everything there is to be known about
biology, I believe, and he knows it and talks about it
with a distinction all his own. I met him one night at
the Planetarium Club, I listened enchanted and I was
seized with the ambition to bottle a few books from
this fountain of information, to our mutual advantage.

As a publisher I take myself seriously, I do my best
to disseminate as good as I can get and on the whole
my partners - they are junior partners, young Clews,
Robinson and now Haggerston — have every reason to
be content with the general result, but Foxfield has
been giving us all a good deal of anxiety. He is behind
time with his copy. He begins writing with vigour
but he seems to run down if he is not looked after, and
he has to be wound up again by my reproachful
pursuit. This book of his is to be a plain treatment of
life and evolution and what signs of a purpose may be
in it all and, like Capek’s play, only insects are to be in
the cast. He is going to call it Thursday's Lesson^
after the Fifth Day of Creation.

Personally I hate insects. Nothing has ever
frightened me so much in my life as a praying mantis
c 33

APROPOS OF DOLORES

that once sat up at me and hissed. I wish God had
taken Thursday off for rest and refreshment and gone
on perhaps after Sunday to make up for it, but as it is
here they are and I suppose we have to kill as many as
we can and make the best of the others. We get
cochineal from them anyhow, honey, silk, valuable
moral lessons and now an increasing amount of biolo-
gical information. Foxfield says that without the fruit
fly there would be no science of genetics worth talking
about and that there is no general problem in his
science that cannot be discussed most conveniently
from etymological instances. And so I have merely
stipulated that when the book is done he would not
insist upon anything too repulsively creepy and crawly
appearing on the outside wrapper.

I had meant to talk to him mainly about business,
I had meant to set him an edifying example of
relevancy, of resistance to discursive tendencies, of
sound practical common sense and all the qualities in
which we differ most conspicuously, but my new-
found idea that pessimism is an error and a morbid
habit of mind, and that life is generally happy, inter-
ested him so much and interested me so much and
kept us both so preoccupied that now I am back here at
Torqudstol I cannot remember whether I ever discussed
the question of deferring publication of Thursday"" s
Lesson at all, and I suppose I shall have to write to him
about it presently. As soon that is as I have written
this. But he thrust a very nasty wedge of doubt into
my conviction, a wedge I am still unable to extract

34

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

completely. As soon as I get that wedge out I shall go
thoroughly into the whole question of the book. What
made his objections more effective was that he really
seemed to want to be in agreement with me.

A large part of the world of life, lectured Foxfield,
can be left out of this question altogether. The bees
and the butterflies are neither here nor there in it.
They know nothing of happiness. They rejoice as
much as and no more than the bubbles in a fountain.
All life above the level of such merely chemical things
as bacteria, he admitted, seems to be run upon a
pleasure-pain system, to be attracted, that is, by this
and repelled by that, but the response of a rootlet or
an amoeba is so prompt and complete that the sensation
must be discharged as soon as it has had time to exist.
Before it has had time to ‘register’. Let alone that
there are no apparent means by which it can register.
There can be hardly more hope or fear in a rootlet as
it pushes its way through the soil and turns aside from
an obdurate rock, than there is in the thread of water
that pours windingly into a rock pool as the tide comes
in. Yet each can have a very eager, searching air about
its movements, which our imagination, mind you,
imposes upon it. ‘Mind you,’ says Foxfield, pinning
you down. It is his stock phrase. He sticks out his chin
when he says it. In his manuscript it appears so often
that it has become a sort of hieroglyphic, a flash of the
pen. Which I blue-pencil automatically and instruct
the printer’s reader to glean after me.

Foxfield doubts if the fierce little crabs who retire

55

APROPOS OF DOLORES

sideways, threatening me with their claws upheld,
until they can sink out of sight in the sand, have
much more retentiveness than a rootlet. They give
no signs of, they have no use for memory 5 they must
live in mere flashes of fear, anger and appetite, in a
myriad of disconnected moments. The fear of your
footfall and shadow dies out and is forgotten. A new
picture of life dawns in the little crustacean brain
ganglion as the former fades away. Conscious life in
them is an incoherent sand of disconnected elations
and alarms. They never suffer from their pains, never
enjoy their pleasures. At their brightest they are
walking in their sleep. Pity is as much wasted on a
crab or lobster as on a fluttering leaf. Seven-eighths
of the animal world is permanently anaesthetized,
declared Foxfield. ‘Except that it doesn’t need to be
anaesthetized, mind you. Memory need not be
paralysed - for that is all an anaesthetic does -
because memory has not yet been born.’

It is only, he declares, when we see creatures
manifestly receiving impressions and not discharging
the stimulus in outward action, but evoking memories,
reviving something learnt, hesitating and forming
decisions, that we are justified in imagining agreeable
and disagreeable states of mind sufficiently ^coherent
and sustained to come within our range of sympathy.
Here at last a primitive happiness and unhappiness is
dawning. Foxfield doubts, he says, if any creature,
not vertebrated, has that much conscious life.

But an octopus remembers, the man at the Nice

36

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

aquarium told me. Foxfield wants to talk to that man.
Ants, he admits grudgingly, may have moments of
fussy solicitude. He doubts even if any fish has much
more conscious life than my liver has or at most than
my brain has .when, in deep sleep, unwatched and
unsuspected dreams chase one another through its cells
from nothingness to forgetfulness. Reptiles again do
not seem to play^ they have the vacuous seriousness of
machines. It is only within the warm realms of fur
and feather that we find any certain manifestation of
the capacity to be happy. Birds, cats and dogs, calves
and mice sit and seem to think, lark about, are inter-
ested, delighted, dismayed or depressed. Anatomically
we find they have organs for the retention of nervous
impressions without any immediate outward response
just as we have. It is that retention which brings in
the preference or the repulsion, the happiness or the
unhappiness. They look, they listen, they wind you,
and the only immediate return in outward action is
that they sniff for further information. The new
impressions pile up inside, reverberate among the
established reflexes, agreeably or disagreeably. They
take something in and it works there. Here certainly
must be continuities kindred to, if not as sustained as,
the continuities in our own minds.

I conceded Foxfield his butterflies and retreated to
the gambolling lamb and the tail -chasing kitten, but
Foxfield went on taking the joy out of the universe.
Still, if he was taking out joy he was also taking out
suffering to correspond. He was narrowing the field of

37

APROPOS OF DOLORES

happiness but he was not tilting any balance against it.
He was also narrowing the field of misery.

How far, he inquired, is the happiness of these
nearer creatures conscious of itself? Do these beasts
know they are unhappy or happy? Our own states of
mind are often inconsecutive and disconnected but
they do generally refer to a self, conscious of its states.
Happiness looks backwards and forward and centres
on an idea of self. Its richness depends on the associa-
tions it involves. Has a cat an idea of itself? A dog has
but Foxfield was not so sure of a cat. Dogs seem cap-
able of self-reproach, but had I ever detected any
introspective quality in a cat? Does a cat ever tell
itself: ‘I am treated unjustly. My life is an unhappy
one?’

When a cat basks in the sun does it say: ‘This is
good’?

‘You don’t know some of the cats I have known,’
I told Foxfield. ‘Nothing on earth will persuade me
that that black cat I have in Paris is not as capable of
self-congratulation as any man. Have you never
watched a cat sitting up on the mat and blinking at a
fire?’

Dolores, by the by, hates my cat. It is a large clean
black cat with perfect manners j it is a tom-cat whose
morals have been put beyond suspicion. It likes to sit
near me and it will never sit near her. On some
private occasion it has explained its view of life to her
pet Bayard, and the little beast never goes near it
except by its grace and condescension. Sometimes

38

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

when I am too long in London Dolores threatens to
have it poisoned. If Dolores addresses it directly or if
her voice rises and she seems set for talking, it drops
plump to the ground and goes quickly but softly to the
door and waits to be let out.

‘You may have your cats/ said Foxfield, reflecting
upon it impartially, with his spectacles consulting
the horizon. ‘You are probably right about cats.^-*

The other day, just before I started upon this trip,
I spent half an hour in silent and sympathetic
proximity to a big rusty-red orang-outang in the
Jardin d’Acclimatation. He is that sort of orang-
outang which has a flat expansion of the cheeks on
either side so that its face, so far as its lower parts are
concerned, looks like a mask. It seems to wear those
huge jaws and lips like something that has been
imposed upon it, and over them very intelligent light-
brown eyes look out with an expression of patient
resignation upon the world. So it has pleased God.
Sometimes those quiet eyes would scrutinize me,
mildly speculative, sometimes they watched other
spectators or brooded upon the baboons in an adjacent
cage, whose sins were as scarlet.

My sage moved rarely, to scratch his chest or his
arm thoughtfully and once to yawn. But even in
captivity and already perhaps mortally sick, for these

59

APROPOS OF DOLORES

great apes acquire tuberculosis and suchlike human
infections with a terrible readiness, he gave no sign of
unhappiness. Those little hazel eyes were wise and
tranquil. Captive and ill, he had every reason to be
unhappy, but I do not think he was unhappy. If I
could have changed consciousnesses with him and got
into that cokernut head of his, I think I should have
perceived a small weak childish interest in spectators,
in baboons -like a child looking out of a window -
little imaginations set going by these sights and nothing
else. I doubt if he was worried and distressed in the
least by his captivity. Quite possibly, but not certainly,
he would have been happier in his native forest, but
he did not know that. He had forgotten his native
forest, or remembered it and the parental nest only
in dreams. There may have been terror in these
dreams and it may have been reassuring to wake in
the large secure cage again. I think he was still to be
counted as a mild fragment of at least contentment.

Before I last crossed to Paris from London I saw a
film called Simba, done by that courageous, enter-
prising and interesting couple Mr. and Mrs. Hope
Johnson^ it gave the most intimate views of wild
animals grazing, prowling, drinking. The sight of
a whole herd of giraffes galloping round in slow
motion was something I shall not easily forget. The
up and down of the balancing heads was delightful.
But that’s by the way. My impression of the bearing
of these lions, wildebeestes, giraffes, elephants and
antelopes, snapped unawares, was one, not indeed of

40

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

vivid delight, but of a satisfied contentment, and that
is my impression also of the domestic animals I see
about me. It has been suggested that the lives of wild
things are ‘fear-haunted’. Fear, I admit, is always
ready to jump out upon wild life, but that it ‘haunts’
them is just what Simba helps me to deny. You want
a more elaborate brain before such haunting can begin.
And as Foxfield insists, animals will not endure un-
happiness any more than they will endure pain. They
begin to do something about it. It may be something
very rash and destructive, but it shunts energy from
suffering to action. Even if they kill themselves the
pain is at an end.

He was not very reassuring, however, about the
amount of pleasure relative to pain and of disagreeable
states relative to agreeable states, among animals. An
animal, he holds, even if it has not the intelligence to
be continuously unhappy, may be discontinuously
unhappy over a large part of its life and still live.
There was nothing in his biological science to assure
us that that is impossible. Foxfield squatting in judg-
ment on a rocky slab at Portumere, slowly drying his
hairy chest and shoulders with a towel and occasionally
stopping altogether to think, would for no considera-
tion endorse that extreme preponderance of happiness
I had seen, as in a vision, at Rennes. He thought that
by the nature of things and taking a long stretch of
time, happiness may ‘preponderate considerably’ over
unhappiness, but not necessarily at any one time nor in
the case of every species.

4»

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Most species in existence must be ‘reasonably well
adapted’ to their conditions or they would not be in
existence. In a species reasonably well adapted to its
conditions the average individual must be fairly well
off by the standards of its nature. The inferior indivi-
duals will be going under in the struggle for existence
and having a bad time 5 that one cannot help, that is
Nature’s universal way 5 but theirs will be the shortest
lives, soonest over. They won’t drag on. And the best
adjusted will live longest and put in larger lumps of
appreciative living. ‘Life refuses to carry pain,’ said
Foxfield. ‘It couldn’t live on, if it didn’t.’ Pain is
Nature’s invitation to rebel. It is Nature’s way of
making the beast realize, ‘This won’t do.’ The beast
rebels, refuses, and it becomes a case of kill or cure.
‘And when it comes to human unhappiness,’ said
Foxfield, emerging from the shirt he was putting on
and staring at me with the inexpressive face of science:
‘I suppose the same thing holds.’

He seized his trousers and put them on, so lost in
thought that it was only when he found some novel
difficulty in adjusting his braces, that he realized he
had drawn them on rear foremost. ‘Blast,’ he said,
and set himself to put matters right. When this
trouble occurred I was going to ask whether it might
not be possible for a human being to find a sort of
happiness in the elaboration of unhappiness. Certain
perplexing things about Dolores were in my mind, but
the fascination of watching Foxfield think out his
trouser trouble, including an interesting phase when

42

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

he had both legs in one trouser, drove my point com-
pletely out of my mind at the time. When at length
he was properly trousered and he could sit on his rock
again, he pushed his hair away from the earnest out-
look of his spectacles and resumed our former discourse.
‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I disagree with Paley from the
outset.’

‘Paley?’

Paley, he reminded me, opened his Evidences by
declaring that the world is manifestly made for the
happiness of the creatures living therein. So Paley
was of my opinion.

‘There,’ said Foxfield, ‘you have the considered
opinion of a cultivated intelligence in the later
eighteenth century. That to him was obvious^ some-
thing no one would wish to dispute.’

Was it generally true that creatures well adapted
to survive lived lives that were mainly pleasant?
Foxfield, sitting like a biological judge, ruled that it
was. Of course the life of many quite well adapted
species was a life of massacre, but that did not mean
that it was unpleasant. Consider the frog. Thousands
of tadj^les were killed for every one that dropped its
tail and got out of the water, and the little frogs
suffered a similar slaughter before the few survivors
grew up, but they lived cheerfully enough until the
blow fell. It was just their careless gaiety got them
killed. Being killed, he said, wasn’t unhappiness unless
you thought about it beforehand. Did any creature do
that but man?

43

APROPOS OF DOLORES

What are the chief factors of unhappiness?
Present pain, fear, grief, but that passes, disappoint-
ment and frustration. ‘Frustration,’ Foxfield repeated,
‘Frustration’, as one might fumble at a clue.

^Is anything more unhappy than a chained dog?’
he asked.

‘Or a caged bird?’ I contributed.

‘Worse than vivisection. People overrate the
agonies of vivisection and underrate cages and chains
and the dismal lives of pets dragging through their
days with every instinct suppressed. . . .’

Bayard panting under the sympathy of Dolores but
knowing no better life and so quite unconscious of the
reason for his yapping viciousness, occurred to me.

§3

Foxfield pursued his argument. In a species
generally adapted to its environment, living under
the same conditions as hundreds of thousands of
previous generations, it was only reasonable to assume
that the normal life was pleasant. And taking life all
over, most species seem to have lived mainly in phases
of balance or with conditions changing so slowly that
they could vary to meet the new requirements. That
gave a considerable preponderance of happiness in the
past history of conscious life.

But that ceased to be the case if for a time conditions
changed too fast. Then the species became a misfit.

44

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

Only exceptional individuals would get along easily j
the percentage of failures and of more or less frustrated
individuals would rise. There was reason to suppose
that a species undergoing extinction or undergoing
violent modification was in many cases living very
unpleasantly indeed. Not always. You could imagine
extinction without unhappiness as well as extinction
with much pain and misery. Supposing the frog’s
surroundings remained the same as they are now
except that some extraordinarily skilful and voracious
frog-eating animal appeared. All the frogs might
ultimately be consumed, but until that time arrived
the individual frog, blind to the massacre of his fellows
and lacking all statistical sense or racial solicitude,
would hop about very cheerfully. But suppose the
adverse change in conditions was not a new frog eater
but a change of frog-food supply - from easily
digestible to unsuitable food! That would make every
individual uncomfortable. A whole species then might
be in distress and pass distressfully towards extinction.

^Elephants,’ Foxfield remarked in parenthesis,
‘suffer greatly from wind. They go about the African
forests making borborygmic noises. Travellers remark
upon the overwhelming smell a herd of elephants
leaves behind it. It seems improbable that this was the
original state of affairs. Something has changed about
their food -even in the forest.’

There may have been epochs in the world’s history,
epochs of exceptional geographical and climatic
change, when most existing forms of life would be

45

APROPOS OF DOLORES

living discordantly and disagreeably, the whole creation
groaning and travailing, living in unsuitable climates,
walking on uncongenial soils, eating indigestible foods.

^And when we come to man,’ said Foxfield and
paused.

‘No other animal seems to be aware of death. Of
all creatures man alone knows that he must die. From
the individual point of view every human life ends in
frustration and this fact casts its shadow before it.’

I objected that few people thought about that.
They managed not to do so. They thought of other
things. And most of those who find the idea trouble-
some, resort to the belief in an immortal soul . . . Not
all, though.

‘Man’ - Foxfield weighed the consideration -
‘certainly has great powers of suppressing disagreeable
facts and thoughts. He contrives not to think about
unpleasant or unflattering things. But what happens
at the back of his mind? Isn’t there an uneasiness?
Aren’t most human beings now, au fond, uneasy?’

Give him time - and he does not need nearly so
much time as an animal because his adjustments are
mental and not organic — give him time and man will
reconcile himself to the most astonishing changes in
his conditions. Nevertheless, some time is needed, and
at present the conditions of human life are changing
so rapidly as to outpace his utmost adaptability. His
knowledge and power increase faster than the wisdom
of his conduct. In his past as the fact of the coming of
death dawned upon his increasing intelligence, he

46

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

could evoke the dream of immortality. Every con-
cession and humiliation that he had to accept as his
social organization developed, for the history of human
societies is a history of suppressions, produced its con-
solations and mental compensations. The civilization
which culminated in Europe in the seventeenth
century developed slowly enough for minds to be
attuned to it. It was homely, it was limited by our
standards, but it had wide stretches of contentment.
There was much incidental crime and cruelty no
doubt in that departing world, purple patches and
streaks of livid colour, but they were in proportion.
They interrupted but they did not upset the rhythm
of that civilized life. It flowered, and its flowering was
its undoing, it engendered chateaux and country
houses where leisure begot curiosity and science, it
tolerated and fostered the kingly sport of war, and so
it prepared its own dissolution.

I described to Foxfield how I had found the seven-
teenth century still holding out in Rennes and what a
pleasant life it had seemed to me.

Foxfield declared that human life at large, from
China to San Francisco, was still being carried on by
what I had just called seventeenth-century traditions.
Most of our race cling still to homely comfort, live their
lives within concepts of national loyalty and decent
morality, of industry and mild effort and saving and
seemly success, of restrained and private joys, of
gentle social intercourse, firm but unobtrusive display
and temperate rivalries and mutual criticism, of little

47

APROPOS OF DOLORES

treats and local interests keenly appreciated. To be
continually busy about a mildly varied series of small
things is still the common desire of mankind. By not
thinking too much of the end of things and taking the
priests’ assurance about it, death was robbed of its
sting. Extreme unction was a great invention — for
the troubled survivor. ^Not an unhappy life,’ said
Foxfield, ‘not by any means an unhappy life . . . But
it has notice to quit. And the notice, mind you, is
getting urgent.’

‘Fate offers a greater human life to mankind now,
a vaster life,’ Foxfield went on. ‘This is a platitude
now. Man can fly, he can travel swiftly to the ends
of the earth, see and hear everything that happens
about his globe, satisfy all his needs with an ever-
diminishing exertion and then, facing a monstrous
leisure, find himself superfluous even for his own
needs . . . And there you are!’

I ‘Hoist by his own petard,’ said I mechanically.

By a moment’s silence Foxfield featured his dis-
taste for stale phrases even in the mouth of a publisher
he has to propitiate, and then he resumed the tenor of
his discourse.

Either, he said, man has to adapt himself con-
sciously to the new, the larger and the appallingly
strenuous and dangerous way of living he has opened
to himself, or as a species he has to suffer some complex
biological d^gringolade. He may differentiate into
conflicting species, into hunter and prey, master
parasite and slave host^ or he may blunder down

48

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

violently to complete extinction. The one thing he
could not do was to stay at where he was and at what
he was at the present time.

Foxfield enlarged upon that and I wish I could
reproduce his words, the flow of sounds upon which
they were conveyed, his earnestness, his spectacles, his
abundant black and white streaked hair, now getting
into the conversation and now blowing away out of it.
He made human destiny look like a madly plunging
horse - with an amateur in the saddle, an amateur
who began by being too indolent to ride it and then
became too scared. And the horse wasn’t a horse
either. It became a bristling nightmare that not only
grew vaster and wilder but threw out spikes and
bayonets and spurred its rider murderously through
the saddle.

More and more of the old social order, prophesied
Foxfield, will dissolve and tumble into a chaos that
may or may not give place to a new creation. There
were no biological precedents to guide us to a prophecy
of the outcome, because man’s limited but incessant
intelligence makes his case unique.

‘But here,’ said Foxfield, with the emotional
impartiality of the scientific man^ ‘here surely are all
the necessary conditions for an extreme and almost
universal unhappiness. Here,’ said Foxfield with the
manner of one who holds up a small specimen of a
rare species, ‘here is a world that the mechanisms we
have invented insist, we must either unify or smash,
and to unify it and adapt ourselves to it means the
^ 49

APROPOS OF DOLORES

elimination of whole classes of nationally and socially
important people. These classes^ which ought to be
superseded now, will probably refuse either to learn or
to vanish. Probably? - a high degree of probability.
They will show fight. They will feel a certain romantic
pride in showing fight. They will hurt and be hurt.
And mind you, it isn’t only adaptation they will resist,
it is also the mass unsettlement of the workers,
released to a dangerous leisure as they will be by
mechanism, that they will have to fear also - and
have every cause to fear. That stares them in the face.
It is the outstanding aspect of the situation for them.
They may display unexpected tenacity and turn an
unknown proportion of our power and machinery to
defensive and destructive ends. They are in fact doing
that.

‘Of course individuals die, generations die and take
prejudices and obsessions with them. Death makes
for progress. Some of us try to give new ideas to the
new generation. You do. But are you getting it over
to them? There’s not much time, mind you.

‘Machines, mind you, are continually diminishing
the need for toil and toilers, and most human beings
at the present level are fit for nothing else. How
can we suddenly make them fit for anything else?
What else? Education you say. But education for
what? What is to be the new economy, the new
functions? Peasant food production was an absolute
necessity up to a hundred years ago^ now it is totally
unnecessary ~ but the tenacious peasant is a very real

50

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

and present fact. On the one hand, you see we have
superfluous classes holding on, on the other, superfluous
masses in the industrial regions and impoverished
peasants rooted wherever the soil is good, masses and
peasants with no purchasing power or with diminish-
ing purchasing power and yet with ever more vividly
stimulated appetites and resentments. Man with
nothing to do is a wretched man and often a dangerous
man. Are we to massacre the unproductive? Even if
we support them they will be intolerably wretched.
Something, mind you, has to be done.

'Mechanical and scientifical progress has abolished
not only the need for gross population, but also that
infantile and general mortality that once kept popula-
tion within practicable limits. Even if population
ceases to increase, even if it diminishes, you will still
have superfluous people. It is not a question of totals;
it is a question of proportion. The fewer the con-
sumers, the less work will there be to do. The need for
children is less and will diminish, and that makes an
increasing proportion of the women in the world
superfluous as mothers, home-makers and - in any
honourable sense of the word - women. Frustration
and perversion of all their distinctive instincts may
presently become the common lot of women. As a
matter of fact from the point of view of preserving the
species a woman’s sexual impulses are a remarkably
poor and inadequate bunch of instincts. In the animal
stages lust was good enough to set them to work; now
women know better. They may tempt and waste

51

APROPOS OF DOLORES

men, but there are limits set to the temptability of the
irritable yet so easily exhausted - so easily exhausted/
he repeated with a remarkable note of lamentation in
his voice ~ ‘male’. For the common women even
more plainly than for common men, there opens the
possibility of leisure without scope or resources and
lives without any ulterior significance.

‘Our world/ he reiterated, ‘is haunted by the
superfluous dissatisfied woman. She darkens the sky.’

For an instant I wondered whether I had ever
talked to him about Dolores, but his next sentence
reassured me.

‘Fbu,’ said Foxfield, ‘with your innate hopefulness,
your sound instinct for what sells a book and your
natural desire to do it by books, school books, encyclo-
paedias and so on, may say that all this can be faced,
controlled and guided into a new happy life for man-
kind. A tremendous education that will have to be.
Every living person a gentleman or a fine lady - and
all of them skilled workers! I am not so sure, Wilbeck.
Not sure at all ~ very doubtful. Very very doubtful. I
do not say you are wrong, mind you, but I cannot
admit you are right. No science at present can say
whether you are right or wrong. There is a super-
fluity of low-grade activity now in human life, a
tremendous gadding about, a superfluity of sexual
appetite, a still greater superfluity of the desire for
excitement, an accumulation of resentment and rest-
lessness. And where's your new education? The whole
creation frets together for it. Adaptation means an

52

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

incalculable amount of unhappiness before even the
way to that new happy life of yours on a higher level,
and as wide as the world, is made plain. If ever it is
made plain. You yourself admitted that the pleasant
glow in Rennes was a sunset glow. Show me any-
where - anywhere on the entire planet - a dawn.’

Thus Foxfield. . . .

What I ought to have said to him was that one
can never say at any particular moment, ‘This is the
dawn or there is the dawn’. His was an unreasonable
demand. One can mark the exact moment of sunrise
indeed but then sunrise is a definite event. It is the
confirmation of a day already established. Unfortun-
ately I did not think of that at the time. But to me
there is a dawn apparent — surely. It has been apparent
ever since the Renaissance. It is a big process and I
give it a long period. It has the diffused imperceptibly
increasing quality of every dawn. People’s minds
move towards ideas of a ‘world order’ ^ more and more
of us take the measure of the complex of problems
involved. The steadily increasing sales of my JVay of
the World series is good evidence for that. A straw in
the wind, but a good omen nevertheless.

People want the knowledge they ought to have. . . .

That new world order will not turn out to be the
dreadful disappointment the aesthetic highbrows
anticipate. The prestige of old institutions melts away^
things which to-day still seem full of traditional saw-
dust may crumple and fall to-morrow. The Dark Ages
are in many respects still here but they draw to an

53

APROPOS OF DOLORES

end. The inundation of the western world by the
dogmatic Judaeo-Christian mythology was a vast
intellectual catastrophe that left man’s understanding
of life buried deeply under a silt of fear, error and
intolerance. This Christian era has been an age of
muttered criticisms, some irony and pretty acute
misery for finer intelligences. Every generation pro-
duced intelligences. Every generation produced in-
telligences acute enough to see through it. It must
have seemed to those exceptional people as though
the human mind was to be suppressed henceforth
for ever. Nevertheless, there is a magnificent bias for
truth in the heart of man. He whispered, he mocked,
he blasphemed. Century after century intelligence
has been struggling back and bit by bit our vision of
life has recovered lucidity.

First cosmogony emerged, the world which
Christian ignorance had stamped upon and flattened
out was rolled up again and measured and the stars
were set back in their places, then as biology developed,
that absurd story of Adam and his irascible Creator
faded out, the fires of hell sank and the Fall lost its date,
and now in the interpretation of history and our
standards of conduct we free our minds from its last
lingering obsessions with that great misconception of
life. Ethical concepts are being reconstructed. Our
manners improve. We control and allay our fretful-
ness. We get new ideas of what our ‘selves’ are, and
realize the hallucinations of egotism.

And in just the measure we liberate ourselves from

64

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

the crude expectations of a more childish past, in the
same measure do we anticipate and escape the conse-
quent disappointments. Because things may presently
be strange by our current way of thinking there is no
reason why they should not be gay in another fashion.
When they come about there will be new ways of
thinking. We shall be dead and all our values with us.
Where I could take issue with Foxfieldis in his assertion
of the excessive rapidity of change to-day - in relation
to the adaptability of man. I admit the rapidity of the
change, but I deny the necessary slowness of the
adaptations required of us. We are not so inadaptablej
he overrates our power to forget.

He underrates how widely a new generation can be
educated away from old feelings. Human beings are
obstinate but not really conservative. In less than a
third of a century, for example, there has been an
immense change in sexual moralsj why should
eqrdvalent changes in political and economic
conduct be impossible? There need not be that age of
catastrophic unhappiness Foxfield saw fit to evoke -
ungratefully, I thought, with that sea-reflected sun-
shine dancing all over him. It may happen but it
need not happen.

After all he isn’t infallible 5 he is capable of putting
on a perfectly correct pair of trousers the wrong way
round. I think he puts some facts the wrong way
round. I believe that by the time change has al-
together dissolved the material supports of this
pleasa_ onably vvary, moder-

APROPOS OF DOLORES

ately pious, patriotic, sentimental, family life which
is still and which has been for hundreds of generations
the normal life of civilized mankind, it is possible and
probable that a new generation will be quite ready
for, and indeed be living brightly in the next phase.
Harder for us to imagine than for them to live in.
That may well be as happy a generation as ours.
Quite possibly very much happier.

Which, by the by, is why I stick to publishing.

One has to do things, since one cannot always be
Boswell observant. Also one must live oneself. I
could not smile at the pleasant spectacle of provincial
Rennes all unawares of the march of events to super-
sede it, did I not feel I was helping make another frame
of active contentment when Rennes and its like are
over. I explain and justify myself to myself as a col-
lector and distributor of creative ideas. I have chosen
to be the servant of, and a part of, this greater new
world that struggles to exist, and not of the old world
that is crumbling away. In this my position as the
inheritor of the major interest in a publishing business
coincides very happily with my line of thought. If
ideas can keep pace with material change all will be
well. But the ideas will have to travel hard to do that.
I’m a postillion in the world of mind and the pace is
my business. I can be happy in this world. I like this
queer trade of a publisher. The business side I do
wdth an effort, but not unsuccessfully. My partners
are good associates, critical but amenable, they believe
in me and our staff is a fine one.

56

WHETHER LIFE IS HAPPY

As I threaded my way back from Portumere to
Torqudstol I turned conclusively against Foxfield's
coming Age of Miserable Leisure. Nothing of that
sort is going to happen. I admit that through this
inevitable phase of universal change ahead there are
bound to be no end of misfits, riddles of adjustment,
frustrations and the ache of impotent leisure, but all
such things may still remain manageable. I grant the
probable billions of distressful cases, the hardships of
learning and the hardship of failing to learn the new
ways, but not the universal tragedy. There are as
good worlds in the womb of time as ever came out of it.

At any rate, I remain cheerful — if only through
some inner necessity. Cheerfulness will prevail. I
believe it in my bones. Our authors, my collection
mainly, criticize this present world to rags^ it is what
they are for, but they jest and whistle at their work
because they believe they clear the site for greater
things. Of course you know my fVay of the World
series. You must know it. It has developed collaterals
and thrown out a sort of twin system in America.
There I work hand in hand with Lenormand. For all
its faults this book propaganda of ours is doing an
educational task that the universities fail to do - and
doing it cheerfully. Doubts are wholesome, but if I
can help it, we will never issue a blankly pessimistic
book to founder souls in trouble.

While there is a chance of the world getting
through its troubles I hold that a reasonable man has
to behave as though he was sure of it. If at the end

57

APROPOS OF DOLORES

your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will
have been cheerful.

Dolores is all the other way. Years ago I said my
luckiest day was the day when I was born. She has
never forgotten that. She still quotes it against me at
lunches or dinners and suchlike social occasions. Her
birth, she holds, was a wrong done to her, a tragedy.
Somewhere she has caught up the phrase ‘I was
sentenced to life'. Yet she sticks to life in gross and in
detail with an extraordinary tenacity — just as she
sticks to me. That does not hinder her in the least
from abusing both of us continually, life I mean and
me. Criticizing, she would call it^ she will never admit
that it is irrational abuse. Her penetration beneath
the deceits of life, she insists, is her misfortune. I wish
it were not also mine. Her radiating antagonism, she
feels, is the proof of her intellectual distinction. She
thinks it is original to contradict. She feels to surrender
is to agree.

58

CHAPTER III

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES
{Torqudstol^ August (^th^ 1934)

§1

In spite of various distractions of my attention, I have
stuck to the task of putting my talk with Foxfield on
record before it began to seep away into the general
mass of my thoughts and experiences. My notes may
have a lot too much theorizing about hfe and its
possibilities in them for your taste, but after all this is
my book and not yours. If you confront me with the
alternative I prefer theorizing to pleasing you. You
can go to some other book if you do not like this one^
or write a book to your own measure.

This may seem insolence but there is really more
insolence in pandering and writing down to the
reader. For that is to assume that he cannot think out
his own ideas for himself and wants you to think them
out for him, it is calling him dull, calling him ego-
centred. I do not publish these propitiatory authors if
I can help it and I certainly do not intend to be one
myself. I am writing about Happiness, Happiness at
large and Happiness apropos of Dolores here, because
I find them profoundly interesting and for no other
reason.

59

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Anyhow I have enough to bother me just now
without considering a reader’s reactions. With the
best will in the world to go on being happy, I am not
happy. I am not amused. I am no longer genial. Why
should I not admit it? I may be happy again presently
— my texture is elastic — but just now I feel that I shall
never be happy again, I feel like a bird put back in its
cage. Dolores and Marie her maid are installed here
with Auguste and the big car, not to mention Bayard
the Pekinese^ she came by road after all and not by
rail because of the bother of coming from the main
line station by the branch hither; Bayard has been
slightly run down and needed professional attention;
and I have had a phase of irritability - for the most
part controlled and concealed - that has made my
writing ((uite difficult enough without any literary
tricks and graces. Endless small distracting exaspera-
tions arose out of the arrival. But I think I have now
got the framework of the matter sketched out.

Let me recapitulate a little and find out how far my
train of thought has travelled. First station; exhilar-
ated by speed and fresh air I thought I had discovered
that happiness was the common background of life.
But Foxfield did his earnest best to deflate that
discovery. Now at the second station I am left asking
myself whether I have discovered anything more than
that a priori^ living things ought to be happy - and
that on two exceptionally sunny days most of those I
-encountered seemed to be so.

Perhaps language misleads us here and makes the

6o

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

positive thing seem the negative thing and vice versa?
If after all I am right, and happiness is the norm, then
it is happiness which is the temporary, outstanding
and interesting fact that has to be dealt with. At any
rate, it was really unhappiness and not happiness that
Foxfield and I discussed. We discussed the conditions
under which unhappiness appears. It can appear only
in the case of a creature with memory and foresight
and even with such creatures it appears only in the
stresses of imperfect adaptation. Speaking from a
scientific standpoint such phases ought to be minor
chapters in the experience of life. Change is rarely
abrupt and convulsive. When change is gradual one
may assume a steady discouragement and elimination
of the imperfectly adapted and a steady advantage of the
happy. Life is self-adjusting.

Under fairly stable conditions all species of sentient
creature should, generation by generation, be getting
happier. But nowadays change is no longer gradual
and we are in such a state of stress as no life has ever
encountered before. Man in the last few score
thousand years has been changing his conditions with
an increasing violence and throwing not only himself
but incidentally most other surviving mammals out
of gear. God knows what man hasn^t thrown out of
gear in the past hundred years. Man is a biological
catastrophe. Hence now, in this age, in this particular
epoch in the history of living creatures, we have a
monstrous amount of misfitting. We have a big and
increasing proportion of individuals, not only men

6i

APROPOS OF DOLORES

but animals, whose feelings, impulses, instincts and
traditions are out of harmony with the realities that
close in upon them. Consider the horses. Consider
the hunt for wild creatures that is going on every-
where. Consider our clearings and sprayings and
ploughings. Consider the frantic terror of a forest fire.
Were there ever forest fires before we came? We harry
all life.

This diagnosis of the biological situation, as Foxfield
and I worked it out, is the modern form of the dogmas
of the Fall and Original Sin. It is a scientific statement
replacing a myth to explain an almost universally
recognized contemporary reality. The whole creation
groaneth and travaileth — now.

My talk with Foxfield and my return here have
brought my train of thought back towards its own
hidden origins. It is possible that beneath the con-
scious surface of my mind there has been another flow
of ideas going on and that my sudden discovery of
happiness when I motored to Rennes was only a vivid
and conscious reaction to suppressed because unwel-
come perplexities. Or, in other words, Dolores has come
aboard that train of thought now, the personification
of human discontent, the living indictment of my
happiness theory^ she and her beastly little dog, her
woes, her spites and quarrels and all her baggage, and
I am no longer an irresponsible passenger. What is
engaging my attention more and more and distracting
it from all the larger aspects of life is the distressful
immediate problem of close association with an

62

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

unhappy, increasingly aggressive fellow creature, and
what I am to do about her. She will not let me be
happy with her and I do not seem to be able to get
away from her. Though I have lengthened our phases
of separation I am still with her altogether too much.
What am I to do?

And what is the world to do with sad, insatiable,
malignant, quarrelsome, grievance-cherishing people?
Why must it suffer them?

I am afraid the sparkle has gone out of the wine
I broached so cheerfully a week ago and somehow I
haven’t the powder to open another bottle now. At
times I can laugh at Dolores but just at present I am
altogether too much up against her for laughter.

I saw to it that my room was on a different floor
from the bedroom and sitting-room she occupies and so
I am able to relieve my feelings by writing a thoroughly
frank and unqualified chapter about her without fear
of interruption. There is nothing else to be done.

Here goes for the case of Stephen Wilbeck contra
Dolores.

For some years now Dolores has been building up
a system of claims upon me and everyone about her,
upon the basis that she is sad. She poses more and
more definitely as an ailing woman acutely dis-
appointed by me and the world. She charges the whole
universe with unworthiness. Her mournful eyes

63

APROPOS OF DOLORES

survey a summer morning and she knows" that it is
deceiving her. A wayside crucifix could not protest
against earthly cheerfulness more resolutely than she
does.

I There has always been a certain disposition on her
part towards the profession of melancholy. And she is
habitually prone to disapprove, condemn and if she
can, punish. Latterly these tendencies have become
more marked. Since she constitutes my essential
household and is my necessary chief companion, so far
as I have household or companion, I am forced into the
position of a judge between her and this world she by
habit and some incomprehensible necessity indicts.
War, pestilence, famine and Dolores cannot shake my
conviction that it might be a much worse world than
it is. It may be lurid, grotesquely cruel at times, mean
and arid at times, it is in a phase of neurasthenia, it
is out of sorts, it needs a cure now, yet even now, at
moments it can be amazingly gay, kind, lovely and
exalting. It is a two-sided world. She will not hear of
that. ‘You are so easily deceived,’ she says. ‘You are as
credulous and changeable as a child. You can be
pleased by anything, you can be generous to anyone ~
except me.’

That is her general attitude. But she is also a
woman of subsidiary attitudes. ‘You would say that,’
she says. ‘But if one day / praised the world you would
make some sneering joke about it.’

And indeed quite possibly I should be astonished
to the pitch of hilarious comment.

64

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

Yesterday evening was saddened by an almost
criminal negligence on my part. I forget anniversaries..
I am not a neolithic agriculturist and I leave the
calendar to my secretary far away now in London.
Summer and winter, sun and rain, week-ends, the
spring and autumn publishing seasons, such loose
anniversaries are good enough for me. But Dolores
reminds me of cardinal dates, and more particularly
of any forthcoming date when a carefully chosen
present would be appropriate. This time because of all
our coming and going either she failed to give the hint
or I overlooked it. So on this 17th of August I walked
into her room in my pyjamas to say good-night to her
as though it was just any night. Even the subtle scent
of jasmin which is Dolores’ passionate intimation, did
nothing to mark the importance of the day.

I drew back the window curtains to look at the town
and church sleeping under the moonlight. T love the
lines of those roofs,’ I said. ‘And those slender trees.’

I made one or two other remarks and became aware
of a portentous lack of response. Not a word. Not a
movement. I turned sharply to find Dolores sitting up
in her bed, pale and intent, a dark hank of hair over
one resentful eye and her long, lean, silver-bangled
arms about her knees.

‘Don’t come near me,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘Go away from me.’

I came and seated myself on the bed. ‘Well?’ I
asked.

£

65

APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘This is the seventeenth of August/ she said. I
gave myself to you - thirteen years ago. Thirteen
years!’

‘Darling/ I parried. ‘It’s so difficult to find any-
thing worthy of you in Torquestol.’

‘You forgot altogether.’

‘Moving about/ I pleaded lamely.

‘You have eaten up my life.’

‘Hardly - eating'

‘You have eaten up my life.’

I made no further attempt to quibble.

‘In those days I was young, happy, rich, free.’

I was in no position to contradict her. The dis-
cussion of her pre-marital position involves many
complicated issues.

‘Look at me now!’

‘Most attractive, my dear, but a little thorny and
difficult.’

‘A broken woman.’

§3

It is thirteen years ago then that Dolores made that
supreme sacrifice, almost in despite of me. Thirteen
years is a considerable piece to take out of the middle
of a lifetime, out of hers as well as out of mine. Yet
it comes with a certain effect of surprise to discover
that we have left this tap running for thirteen years.
Thirteen years. I am in my forty-sixth year and
already nearly a decade past the better half of life.

66

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

I was thirty-two then and we met for the first time
a week or ten days before. We were both staying at the
Hotel Pension Malta between St. Juan and Antibes, I
with a small group of friends and she with a Swiss
photographer, Fraulein Kettner, rather older than her-
self. My friends were conscientiously cheering me up
after my earlier matrimonial disaster. For I had been
divorced already. I had had to give my wife a divorce.

I was understood to have behaved very handsomely
to Alice, though as a matter of fact I was never of that
opinion. But I saw no reason whatever at the time to
fuss about the judgments that were passed on us. No
discredit attached to either of us. The truth about our
affair was not so much distorted as simplified by the
omission of most of the essential facts. She remarried
and I went my way — ostensibly a lonely man. There
were attempts to console me, not unpleasant attempts,
for the nineteen-twenties were easy years, but none
of my consolations took a permanent form until
Dolores grasped my situation.

I had joined up early in 1915 and served most of my
time on the western front, getting nothing more
serious than a broken arm in a trench raid in 1916.
I did my soldiering fairly well, I was made a sergeant-
major and had some difficulty in avoiding a commission.
I liked the men I was with better than the later type
of temporary gentleman which broke upon the world
after 1917. I wasn’t particularly horrified by my war
experiences, most of them happened in hot blood and
in the spirit of a game, I found I could keep my head

67

APROPOS OF DOLORES

in a bomb and bayonet fight and kill a man and laugh^
and I had the luck never to see anyone broken up
disgustingly or pitifully. Or I have forgotten it. Up
to a certain limit a normal memory purges itself of
painful details and so far as that side of things is con-
cerned I came out of the war practically unscathed,
I have forgotten the pain of my wounded arm, the
anxiety of being shelled, fears in a raid, the stress of
crawling exposed in the open between the lines. I
know that I went tlnrough these experiences, but the
facts are completely stripped of feeling now and I
hardly ever dream of them.

The thing that haunts me most, curiously enough,
is the feeling of being lousy and not being able to do
anything effective about that. There are endless other
memories of course but none that recur so often. For
me the worst aspect of the war was not so much its
dreadfulness as its dirtiness. It was, I realized, long
before it was over, idiotic au fond and a bloody filthy
affair on the face of it. It was not even ‘a war to end
war’ as it well might have been in a saner world. That
phrase was perhaps the premature squeak of a coming
world community — and at the time I admit quite
ridiculous. I stopped thinking of the particulars of the
war from the day of my discharge. They did not join
on to anything later. My mental direction is forward;
I doubt if on an average I spend five minutes a day in
recollection. I did not even blame those old men who
were the normal scapegoats of the young in those days.
I bore no particular grudge against anyone. Though

68

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

maybe the next generation may find reason for bearing
a considerable grudge against us. But my angry sense
of an unnecessary exposure to the confused dirtiness
underlying life, remained and remains.

I met Alice when I was on leave in England
mending my arm. She was working in the art
department of my father’s publishing business
(Bradfield, Clews and Wilbeck)- He had taken the
producing organization out of London to Durthing
and the better to control its development he had
moved into a rambling untidy house there. The wdr
had held up his plans to a certain extent but he was
carrying on as well as he could. ‘Wars may come/ he
said, ‘and wars may go, but man’s duty to thought and
knowledge is eternal.’

I went to stay with him and I met Alice at one of
the staff dances. She was a bright-coloured girl with
alert brown eyes and quick obvious explanations for
everything that came to her. Her imagination was all
aflame for comforting a wounded hero and I with my
arm in a sling was an entirely adequate wounded hero.

One of the unexpected things that happened during
the Great War was a quickening of the tempo of
sexual life for both sexes. Tempo quicker and the pitch
higher. If I had Foxfield here I suppose he would
be able to explain why that should be true quite as
much of the young women as of the young men, but
I must confess I do not see how it got at our woman-
kind as it did. I can understand that youngsters like
myself with the possibility of premature extinction

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

continually under their noses^ should be obsessed by
the desire to have at least one good experience of
passionate love before the end, but I cannot understand
why it was that maidenhood lit up and met us more
than half-way.

Alice and I were devoted to each other before the
evening was out, we realized we had been created
specially for each other’s delight and solace, and we
made the best of our time with a solemn exultation.
We married as naturally. She invented nicknames,
baby-talk, caresses and occasions for delight as though
she was the very genius of love. My father disapproved
of her and our marriage, just as he hated my early
enlistment, he thought I was careless about myself
but in this case too he made no insurmountable
obstacles. She did her utmost to win by a brand of
flirtatiousness devised specially for him. He was the
sort of parent one calls ‘Father’, but she called him
‘Dadkins Darling’. She had a playful way of kissing
him on the bald spot on his head, and I doubt if he
ever liked it. ‘She’s a bright girl,’ he said, and it was
the utmost praise I ever extorted from him. Even that
was qualified by, ‘I wonder what your mother would
have thought of her’.

For a time she was fairyland and all the Venuses
for me. Her youthfully slender body had a blinding
loveliness. I could not understand why the whole
world was not rapt in admiration at her wonderful
sayings and doings. And yet all the while something
was sitting in the back of my mind making observa-

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

tions to her detriment. I never realized it at the time.

Later all that subconscious dossier came to the
surface.

I left her installed in my father’s house but when I
came back for an abruptly truncated leave early in
1918;, she had taken our infant daughter and gone to
live with her married sister outside Durthing. She
explained that my father hadn’t understood the need
she was under for friendship and cheerfulness before
the arrival of our child and she had thought its birth
would put him out. It was more convenient to be with
her sister who had two babies already. My father
explained nothing and said hardly anything about her.

I thought motherhood had changed Alice, she was
plumper and whiter, her once deliciously slender neck
seemed shorter and thicker and her figure fuUer, and
at first she was a little lacking in her old ardour. Then
her interest in me revived. But with a difference in
quality; there was none of the old animation. She
became extremely sentimental in her sensuousness.
She lamented our separation. ‘Will this war never
end?’ she asked. ‘You are the only man I have ever
really loved — could ever really love. We are like
Cupid and Psyche, a lovely dream in the night. Then
off you go again.’

We had a little difficulty in being together; there
was no room for me at her sister’s house and she did
not like coming to my father’s, because, she said, of his
coldness towards her. There were a lot of young
friends frequenting her sister’s; mostly people doing

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

munition work at Dray, and the second act of our
little love opera had far too much chorus in it and not
nearly enough duet for my taste. Matters improved
between us before I went. She spent the last three
nights of my leave in my home and we parted with a
great effusion of love, tears and tenderness, my father
ignored in the background.

But things had changed. I can still recall quite
distinctly the mood in which I thought about her, as I
lay on the deck of the unlit hushed boat that was taking
me back through the night to the muttering guns in
Flanders. The goddess of desire, that incomparable
being to whom unfaithfulness was unthinkable because
there was no one like her, had evaporated from my
mind, and a young woman with a sister and a circle of
friends and a set of exceedingly commonplace ideas
had replaced her. Making love which had been wildly
beautiful had become an accommodation to urgent
desire. Previously she and I had been two figures
alone in a wonderful love dance, heedless of anyone
about us. All that had gone. I had found something
faintly but persistently antipathetic in that circle of
hers. Talking to them was difficult and she seemed to
share all their ideas. Like the early Christians they
had their ideas in common. We had arranged to set
up a household when I returned to England but we
had found it difficult to determine where that little
home would be. It was evident she would resist living
in my home and that she would remain antagonistic to
my father, to whom I was attached rather more than is

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

the way with most sons. But she wanted to be close
to her sister and her circle.

I came back after the war to solve the problem of
my household, soberly and sensibly. She was my dear
wife and I had to do the right thing by her. And - it
was a material consideration with me as it would be
with most healthy young men of my age — life with
her in any conditions would be a relief from much
celibate austerity.

But when I returned I found our affair had entered
upon a third phase. She refused absolutely to come
and stay with me in my father’s house at Durthing
and I went to her at her sister’s at Dray. I had again
that sensation of meeting a stranger that to a lesser
degree I had already experienced during my second
leave. Not for this woman was it that I had kept
myself chaste in France. I found her not indisposed
for her wifely duty, but any grace of passion between
us had vanished.

The house seemed more encumbered by daytime
visitors than ever. Among them I became particularly
aware of the brooding presence of a tall stooping
spectacled figure, George Hoopler, who seemed to be
always looking mournfully at Alice and avoiding any
exchange with me. He was not quite in the swim
with the rest of her circle ^ he had an air of being drawn
in. She had, as a matter of fact, drawn him in. She
talked about him. He was extraordinarily clever, she
said, ^practically an intellectual’. He had read all sorts
of books and did essays and reviews in one or two of

73

APROPOS OF DOLORES

the weeklies. And he had been a wonderful friend to
her and her sister in some quite undefined way. It was
a pity I didn’t like him. She was sure he could tell me
all sorts of things about books. He was writing a
poetic novel but he was telling no one about it. She
seemed to know a tremendous lot about him.

At the time I regarded Hoopler as merely an added
layer to the film of boredom that dimmed the Dray
world for me. I had not the imagination to be
suspicious.

^Let’s get out of all this for a bit/ said I. Xet’s
run off for a long week-end to Brighton and try and
feel like old times.’

‘Oh, not BrightonV she exclaimed sharply.

‘Folkestone/ I said not noticing at the time that
emphatic rejection of Brighton, and to Folkestone we
went.

And at Folkestone it came out. It was borne in
upon me by successive shades of intimation that there
was something - something very profound and serious
going on between George Hoopler and Alice. I pro-
tested at the perpetual recurrence of his name in our
talk. ‘But if you understood him - !’ she said.

I realized she was feeling her way towards the
disclosure of a romantic situation. At first for many
reasons I found it almost incredible. And it was George
Hoopler’s soul that came into the picture long before
his drooping body. She made her revelation in her
nightgown by moonlight at our bedroom window
looking out upon the sea. She and Hoopler were soul-

74

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

mates and they had carried mutual understanding to
an almost orgiastic level.

‘You mean — I said bluntly.

‘He is so tender/ she said. ‘It is all so different.’

(That suddenly I guessed was why she had barred
Brighton.)

My first reactions were primitive. I ‘saw red’, as
they put it in the lower grades of the commissioned
ranks. I was acutely angry. ‘That I said. I had a
preposterous vision of punching poor old Hoopler
about, bending him in the middle and trampling on
his glasses. Then I thought of giving Alice a memor-
able shaking and spanking and then in an unusual flash
of comprehension I realized that that was precisely
what she wanted. Because to hit a woman is complete
condonation, and also she would have liked it. So
instead I simply put her down with a bump in another
chair and stood up and dusted my knees, so to speak,
of her. ‘You nasty little thing,’ I said. ‘Why are you
here with me?’

‘Because I love you too,’ she wept. ‘Because I love
you too.’

The projected situation was submitted to me tear-
fully and in fragments while I dressed. It had many
of the traits of a long prepared recitation but it lost
much of its force because it was delivered to my mov-
ing back. ‘Why are you putting on your clothes?’ she
said, breaking off short in the middle of it.

‘Because I’m going to take another room.’

‘But what will the hotel people think?’

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘They’re not what one calls Great Thinkers,’ said I.
Tt is I who will do most of the thinking to-night.’

I packed a provisional bag for the night and retired.
She was manifestly surprised at my departure. I was
not behaving quite as she expected; I was rather like
an actor who had learnt a part out of another play. She
had, I know, expected me to behave as though she was
the only Alice in the world. So perhaps I should have
behaved a year and a half before. And she would
certainly have made it clear in the most effectual
fashion that my loss was not irreparable, if only I
would realize the essential goodness and purity of the
Hoopler affair. But suddenly the world was full of
Alices for me, one for every man and a few over. It
is one of the things that a woman finds hardest to
understand in life, that for a time she can be the only
rapture in the world for a man, sole custodian and
dispenser of delight for him, and then in the twinkling
of an eye become just one individual packet of an
overproduced standard commodity. It came to me
that night as though I had known it for a long time,
that Alice, my once peerless Alice, was of no more
value to me now than any other passably pretty young
woman.

I sat sternly in my new room for some time, no
doubt with folded arms. I forget. I surely acted my
part to that extent. I had been betrayed. My honour
had been hopelessly soiled.

But gradually a feeling of release arose in me and
irradiated my mind. I was surprised at my own

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

duplicity. I knew I ought to feel all the fury of the
cheated male animal and instead I only felt some -
and it dwindled rapidly. A cloud of dull foreboding
had been lifted out of sight. I need never find that
little home poised between Durthing and Dray. I
need never settle down to domestic life with Alice;
sister and friends intervening. I need not be estranged
from my father any longer.

My course became clear before me. She should
have George Hoopler and George Hoopler should have
her. All that I recalled of his behaviour since my
uxorious return convinced me of that. He deserved
her and I did not. He deserved her ~ richly. He was
the sort of lover who for no particular reason likes to
stand in the rain for a long time outside the house of
the beloved. I was certainly not his equal at devotion.
I dismissed a subconscious suspicion that I was being
a little hard on Alice.

A strong streak of humbug in my composition came
to the surface and spread all over it. An ignoble
amusement in the little drama Alice had prepared
swamped the last vestiges of the proper feelings of a dis-
honoured husband. Abruptly I laughed aloud, stood
up and went to bed, whispered to my pillow that I was
a free man again, and on that thought slept quite
happily.

The morning found me serenely sure of the part
I had to play. I would ennoble the situation and give
Alice all the sentimental honours necessary to start her
satisfactorily in her new life. She had found her true

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

affinity. She had been swept off her feet. So be it.
Why should she be ashamed of herself? I would be
saddish but very generous and kind. I would recognize
the essential if rather vaporous nobility of George
Hoopler. Stern I would be, and wounded. Wounded
to the quick. I even rose to saying on one occasion,
*My God! but this is hard on me, you know!’ which she
received with a sort of tender triumph.

I think she had a fairly satisfactory time between us
though I doubt if it went exactly as she had planned it.
She did her best to get a maximum of situation. She
was dreadfully torn, she said, because she really loved
us both. She did her best to dispel any doubts I might
have felt about that, whenever we were alone together.
I had not, she reiterated, lost my physical magic.
Happily our state does not recognize polyandrous
marriage or she would certainly have demanded one,
a polyandrous marriage in a perpetual state of explana-
tory disruption. It would have suited her temperament
exactly. There was a more realistic element of trouble
in her thoughts, which I ignored steadfastly, about
whether George Hoopler was in a position to keep a
wife. I ignored that issue because I felt the situation
ought to be sustained upon a higher plane. There was
much unnecessary coming and going and several quite
compromising interviews before and during the
divorce proceedings. But I was set inflexibly upon
renunciation and whenever I softened towards tempta-
tion under the influence of old habit I did my best to
conjure up the image of George Hoopler inamorato

78

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

but Still wearing or trying to wear those insecure
glasses of his^ and generally that sufficed ~ at any rate
to keep things in their proper proportion.

Upon one sensible thing I insisted. I would have
no half-and-half measures about the child, no coming
and going between Daddy Wilbeck and Daddy
Hoopler to puzzle her poor little wits and create
difficult explanations for her later on with her school-
mates. 'You have to be her sole father now/ I said to
Hoopler with a suitable break in my voice. ‘Let me be
forgotten.’

‘You are splendidV whispered Hoopler, clasping my
hand. I have never realized before how greatly
spectacles can enhance the absurder types of emotion.

I arranged with him and not with Alice for a special
allowance for the child. I knew, and it turned out so,
that I could trust him in that matter. She I certainly
could not trust. She would have deflected that money
to dresses - to treats.

I emerged from the affair at last in a state which
I can only describe as over-disillusionment about love.
It was not uncommon among returning soldiers. It
was just as prevalent among the young women who
had complicated themselves at home. You cannot
clean up adulteries any more than you can unscramble
eggs. I laughed ~ but not so very happily. I had a
number of ‘affairs’ and none of them were very agree-
able because in no case was I either really loved or in
love. Not even while the affair lasted. For anyone
with an imagination, promiscuity speedily becomes

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

the dullest game in the world. But I went about life
in a rather Byronic manner, except on occasions when
my natural cheerfulness broke through.

My father was ailing and very keen for me to take
up the business as soon as possible. Now that the war
was over he was impatient to see his plans being
realized - and they were very sound and far-seeing
plans. I did not know that he was a dying man but
I think he did. I have always found business a much
more sustaining interest than women. I have always
liked women I admit. In those days they deflected me
powerfully, but my imagination of a publisher’s r61e
held me as no woman could do. Whenever I found
sentimental tentacles wrapping about me in the wake
of some sensuous appreciation, I would think of George
Hoopler and of possible other George Hooplers. I liked
women but I found I could not dangle after them.
Competing for them bored me. If they were only
to be had that way, then the other chap could have
them. My idea of love was a cheerful, natural
reciprocity of help and pleasuring and a certain mutual
flattery and reassurance - with no thought or possibil-
ity of third parties intervening from either side of the
picture. Love, if it was any good at all, was an honest
alliance of two people well suited to each other, against
the impertinence of third parties. With laughter in it.
So I thought. So I suppose I still think at the back of
my mind. And still I do not know why we should not
all of us pair off in that spirit.

Few men and women, I realize, succeed in getting

8o

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

things like that. But surely some do. I have been
doing my best to fit my life to that pattern. For
thirteen years. (It seems incredible but it is thirteen
years!) They fit their lives together. Some do and I
am not doing it 5 it is becoming more and more hope-'
lessly uphill work and life is slipping away.

§ 4

In that time before the advent of Dolores I wanted
the intimacies of a wife, a quite imaginary wife, very
greatly, and at the same time I was persuaded that any
intimacies of the peculiar quality I desired were to
an extreme degree improbable. I pretended to be
aloof in spirit from women, and in reality in spite of
myself I watched them closely with an irrational
fantastic expectation. I sought to maintain a cheerful
cynicism in my incidental love affairs. And meanwhile
Fate, with that humorous malice that so often dis-
tinguishes her, was steering me and Dolores through
the world until we came together.

Our party at the Hotel Pension Malta et Syracuse
consisted of my painter cousin, John Wilbeck, who
has a passion for sympathizing with anyone who will
stand it, his new wife, Virginia, Tom Gadsby who was
and still is going to do remarkable things with the
films, a young but platim;yjn blonde whose name I
forget but who was in a perpetual quarrel with Tom,
Mrs. Percher the novelist and her husband Rodberry -

F 81

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Percher is her pen name and has survived two previous
husbands. We all sat at the same table and bunched
together on the beach.

But we were not a tight group, we frayed out and
other groups frayed in to us. There were, I remember,
three young women in languid pursuit of the arts and
in active pursuit of excitement, two of whom were
quite well off because their brothers had been killed
in the war. There were a number of other friendly
young people who fade off into forgetfulness, and a
small, malignant-looking man with an excessive fore-
head and a bristling becird, every hair of which seemed
to be trying most desperately to get away from the face
to which it was inexorably fixed, spreading out as
though it disliked its source and its fellows with an
equally ferocious intensity. He was said to be writing
a life of Stendhal or Dostoievsky or somebody like that.
We talked literature, or rather the others did, and I
listened as a mere publisher, we talked art and socialism
and social science, that is to say, sex, we gossiped and
speculated about ourselves and everyone within range
in the most psycho-analytical and intelligent fashion,
and we bathed a lot and played volley-ball and drank
cocktails and gambled a little at Boule, and ate, and
went to Nice and ate, and went to Cannes and ate,
and bathed and went to St. Paul de Vence and Gagnes
and the Chateau Madrid and La Reserve here and La
Reserve there and ate, and so on. One eats so well in
France. None of us were drunkards and none of us
were gamblers and most of us were staying for three

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

weeks at the outside. We had a tendency to pair off
as the evening drew on, most marked when the moon
was full and the evenings bright, and John, my
cousin, watched me gently with his large grey eyes,
or went about quietly behind my back, telling the
story of my broken heart and expatiating upon the
simple generosity of my nature. But of course that
there was something to be said for Alice also.

I was, after my nature, a good deal amused and
rather restless. I had never been on the Riviera before,
the only France I knew was the war zone, and I found
something pleasantly a little out even in the colour of
the bougainvillia upon the walls and the fugitive
cypresses all over the place, as though a cemetery hung
with purple magenta had been raided and dispersed by
the police. I liked the way the fronds of the palm
trees, introduced from warmer climes, rustled and
shivered in the wind. I liked the way in which the
eucalyptus from Australia, like those self-sown weeds,
the cultured Riviera Americans, seemed just as much
at home as anybody. I liked the widely diffused
refreshment, in such delightful contrast to our own
morbid British concentration at the rare infrequent
public house. I liked the way the houses were painted
yellow or primrose or blueish-white or sang de boeuf,
and patched never quite in the same colour, and I liked
the unusual mongrelization of the dogs. Their
ingredients made a sort of crossword puzzle of them
I played a silly game of naming them, Dalmastiffs
Irretrievers, Spanchow terriers and so forth. But I wil

85

APROPOS OF DOLORES

not expatiate on my appreciations; I mention them
merely to show how unwarrantable were the sensitive
whisperings of my cousin John.

I might perhaps have developed an insincere
interest in one of the three detached artistic girls if
only they had not had so much in common that I could
never tell them apart. One was red-haired^ one was
dark and swarthy and one was dark and pale, but all
the same I could not tell them apart. They shared
their laughter, their smart remarks, their loud cries
of surprise, their chortles - those were the days when
bright young things ‘chortled in their joy’ - they
shared these things as the Parcae shared one eye. I
believe they interchanged their short skirts, their
tanned trousers, their black and blue pyjamas, their
exiguous revealing vests and shirts and their excessive
berets. I had more than a suspicion that they con-
sidered me a laggard in love — a hard thing for a self-
respecting, holiday-keeping, willing young man to
endure - but all the same there was nothing I could
do about it. I did kiss and fondle one of them quite
a lot one evening until we were interrupted, but when
it was too dark to tell whether she was red or swarthy
or pale - and anyhow, in that atmosphere, that was a
mere nothing. The next morning they all, I thought,
had a slightly kissed and rumpled look. Maybe they
didn’t know which it was themselves.

Dolores appeared in the Hotel Pension Malta et
Sycracuse as an entirely more distinguishable person-
ahty, five or six years older than any of the three,

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

already with that slightly haggard look of animation
that has always characterized her, and I saw her first
as a rather graceful slender back and a too stylish little
hat bargaining very earnestly with Madame Hook, our
proprietress. Fraulein Kettner stood behind passively
but firmly in support. ‘And now,’ I heard Dolores say
in a peculiar fluting voice that was soon to become
excessively familiar to me, ‘since there are two of
us, there must be a further reduction.’

I passed as quickly as possible because I caught the
dread in Madame Hook’s eyes, dread lest I should
overhear the ignoble concessions she was making and
suddenly join in the fray exclaiming: ‘And now since
there are three of us, there must be a further reduction!’

Dolores’ appearance in the dining-room that night
created a sensation. Never have I seen anyone not
looked at so hard and markedly. She was dressed with
a kind of fashionableness that followed no known
fashion, as though she belonged to the smart set of
another world. Contrary to the spirit of the Hotel
Pension Malta et Syracuse she was considerably be-
jewelled, and her make-up had a richness that made
John’s wife suggest she had recently escaped from some
harem. ‘Armenian,’ suggested Mrs. Percher. ‘Eastern
certainly,’ said Mr. Rodberry. ‘Something tragic in
the face,’ said my cousin John scenting new scope for
sympathy. ‘A camera wouldn’t make Anything of her,’
said Tom Gadsby and immediately the platinum blonde
looked reassured.

Dolores’ companion evoked no surmise. She was

85

APROPOS OF DOLORES

the sort of Swiss German woman who can go anywhere
and do anything without exciting remark.

Dolores had some critical remarks to make about
the menu to the maitre d’hdtel but these were
inaudible at our table. Then for a time we gave our-
selves up to the normal business of dining. I was
recalled to Dolores by a nudge from my cousin-in-law.
Dolores had produced a lorgnette and was surveying
her fellow pensionnaires with an expression of
mitigated disapproval. A lorgnette is such an elderly
weapon as a rule that it made her look very young and
bright. She delivered her impressions to Fraulein
Kettner in a voice clearly intended to be audible. The
hotel, the dinner, the company were all banal. It was
what she desired. She could compose herself here.
There was nothing to disturb her. At last she would
be tranquil. For a time the lorgnette swept about like
a searchlight. It rested on an adjacent group, it paused
on John, it paused on me. It paused for quite a time
on me. Then she spoke to her companion in an under-
tone and Fraulein Kettner looked at me also. She
looked at me as a Swiss German botanist might look at
an unusual flower. ‘Damn the woman’s impudence!’
thought I. ‘What right has anyone to set about making
me self-conscious?’

The two women left the dining-room before we did
and as they rustled by me I heard the faint tinkle of
metal bangles and sensed what is now the familiar
whiff of jasmin. But then, in those days of innocence,
I did not even know it was jasmin.

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

‘Who the devil are they?’ asked Rodberry,
watching them disappear into the evening blue. ‘I
must have one of my private and confidential chats
with Madame Hook.’

‘That woman has suffered/ said my cousin John,

§5

Dolores’ disposition to have an affair with me
became very manifest during the next day or so. I
shall be exalting my rdle in this little drama if I do not
write rather vulgarly about it. It began as the common
sort of thing that happens in hotels and on liners. I
cannot now recall the precise incidents that brought us
together. I had nothing to do with the first entangle-
ment of our group with the new-comers. I discovered
Mrs. Percher in a beach chair between two beach
chairs listening to that fluent fluting voice ~ the voice
that has flowed through my life now for a dozen years
and more. ‘Most women, I find, have no objective in
life. I find a woman’s life one long succession of
banalities.’ If Dolores was not saying that then, she
was probably saying something else quite like it. I
went on, to be accosted — an unusual thing - by that
macrocephalic worn-out hair-brush I have already
mentioned, the man who was supposed to be a high-
brow translator. ‘Do you know we have an Egyptian
princess in the pension?’ he said.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘Does that account for the Turkish trousers and the
gilt slippers?’ I asked.

‘I thought she was oriental from the beginning.’

But he had thought wrong. She was not oriental
from the beginning. She had only been quite
transitorily oriental. My own first impression of
Dolores had indeed assigned her to nothing more
oriental than France. I had thought she was a lady
of some enterprise, possibly with a certain local social
footing, something between an artist’s model and,
let us say, the niece or partner-daughter of a perfume
or antiquity dealer, in one of the less ventilated streets
of Paris. The sort of dealer who wears an embroidered
smoking-cap and slippers in one of those streets which
smell of sandalwood, where west is east and the
Mysteries of Paris still seem credible. Or better perhaps
Marseilles. I had never been to Marseilles but I had
heard of Marseilles and from all I had heard it seemed
just the place to produce her.

But I, too, was out. She was really Mondgasque,
the lawfully begotten daughter of a Scotch gentleman
of family who spent his days trying to get into the
JVIonte Carlo Casino somehow - there were official
obstacles — before his wife could requisition his
quarterly allowance. And on the other side, too,
Dolores could boast of high parentage. Her mother
was, I learnt, of peculiarly aristocratic Armenian
origin (though hitherto I had been unaware that there
was an Armenian aristocracy), a severe economist but
otherwise a vivid rather than successful home manager.

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

IThe manage was neither happy nor unhappy but
incoherent 5 the parents would probably have quarelled
even more bitterly than they did, if they had had a
firmer grasp on each other’s ideas of what constitutes
French^ and the cooking, I believe, was good even if
the meal times were indeterminate. It seems to have
been one of those cases where East meets West and
everything gets very confused, and Dolores had revolted
at a comparatively early age against the general
disorderliness of her home.

The genes of some methodical Scotch puritan
ancestor had emerged in her and combined with an
Armenian quickness of mind had seemed to steer her
straight towards success in school and to teaching,
secretarial or literary work. But the variegated racial
and social suggestions of her schoolfellows in her
polyglot school, the general atmosphere of the place,
various accidental encounters with men and above
all what is called ‘urge’, had turned her face towards
romance and a number of emotional situations,
towards changes of domicile and travel^ her career
culminated in some sort of real marriage with a
perfectly genuine Egyptian prince who smashed
himself up in a car-race a year or so later and left her
very poorly provided for. For a time she was undecided
whether to become a nun or a nurse, settle down to
writing the Romance of Her Life or what. She was
deeply sensible of her essential brilliance and of great
literary and artistic gifts, and in her anxiety to leave
nothing undone, seemed likely to achieve nothing.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

The meretricious quality of her costume was due to
the romantic adventurousness of her taste rather than
to any definite vocation.

I cannot now remember whether my first t6te t6te
with Dolores was brought about by my initiative, nor
exactly where it occurred. I am inclined to suspect the
good faith of my memory in this sort of recollection.
I have a loyal rather than a meticulous memory. It
will do almost anything to please me. It has a quite
different character from the rest of my mind. Probably
I contributed more to our coming together than I can
now recall. The morals of all healthy young men
suffer in idleness and a single oncoming woman may
have seemed more practicable to me than a trinity.
I insist on this base and vulgar note because it was in
that spirit that I behaved.

Men must be very old or very unworthy when they
doubt the flattering confidences of a woman who
attracts them, and I believed most of the story that she
told me herself on the beach, amidst the tamarisk, in
the evening sunshine and by moonlight. Fraulein
Kettner was usually at some distance away, holding
the little translator, who showed a disposition to follow
us about, in a web of cultured international conversa-
tion. Dolores talked fluent English with a few Scot-
ticisms and hardly a trace of French accent. She has in
fact talked fluent English to me ever since, pausing
only for eating, sleeping and interludes of passion.
She talked about herself copiously and picturesquely
and when she said ever and again, ‘Tell me something

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of yourself’ it meant that she went on talking, but
about her impressions of me. Her faith in her own
intuitions and observation has always been remark-
able. Some few statements I got in edgeways and she
at once turned them flat side round and made the
most of them, and also she asked a few questions, con-
cluding with ‘Yes? No?’ to give an indication of the
number of words permitted in the reply.

‘You loved your father? Yes? No?’ — she did not
wait for an answer because something else had come
into her mind that followed naturally on the mention
of the word ‘father’. ‘I loved my father. His com-
plexion was like a shining pink cherub’s patterned
with golden fish scales.’

Yet in some manner she was able to get a con-
siderable grasp upon my position and intentions. Her
questions she thrust at me so that there was no
alternative but to answer them or get up and walk
away. I certainly told her how I had just inherited a
stable publishing business with great possibilities and
how I believe that publishing might be made a power-
ful educational force in the world. I was thinking out
our Way of the World series then, and I sketched the
project with the hopefulness of a young man. I
remember her excessive enthusiasm. She came close
to mej she turned the warmth of her face up to me.
‘To think of you, so quiet, so unobtrusive, with those
firm hands of yours, moulding the thought of the
world! It is beautiful,'^

I could hardly protest. I had asked for it. And

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indeed I liked it. My opinion of her rose with her
opinion of me.

‘The first time I looked at you I knew you were
like this/ she said. ‘My intuitions are very rapid/ and
she heaped the most astounding flattery upon me.
I was not like other men. I seemed to fill the world
with purpose and so forth. But it is painful for me
now to write down how admirable I was at that time.
I do not remember how far I believed what she said
but, what was quite as effective for her immediate
purpose, I believed that she believed it. She exalted
me, she made me so noble that for an evening or so
more matters remained on the spiritual plane.

It was my cousin John who brought me back to earth.

^How that woman loves you!’ he remarked.

‘She has been telling you!’

‘Yes. She has been telling everybody. Except
those three English girls who cut her. What a
wonderful life she has had!’

‘She has gone into that too? About the ride across
the desert and the night at the oasis?’

‘She told me about that. And so vividly^’* said my
cousin John. ‘And she told me your idea of organizing
people’s thoughts and ideas. It’s wonderful, Stephen,
how your mind has grown under suffering. It’s a
splendid idea - ’

‘She told you thatV

‘It’s fascinated her. She was full of it.’

‘She seems to have - almost a passion for telling
things.’

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

‘She’s mentally excitable and forthright/ said
cousin John.

‘Yes. Do you know, John, at moments I feel as
though I had gone bathing with her and she’d
managed to drown my clothes.’

‘You’re not really a cynic,’ said John.

I decided that there should be something between
us that she wouldn’t care to make public. But there I
underrated her quality. . . .

Dim moonlight, the sacrifice creeping softly to me,
the faint shivering tinkle of a bangle and a reek of
jasmin, the trembling moment and the searching
hands - thirteen years ago. It did not feel at all like
being pounced upon and devoured. . . .

The next day I overheard her telling Fraulein
Kettner^ ‘the perfect lover!’ She added an appreciated
detail.

And at lunch time the three English girls would
not see me, as markedly as possible. So evidently they
knew and were either deeply shocked or deeply
annoyed or both.

§6

That, I realize, was thirteen years ago. I thought
at the time that this affair would be just an exotic
version of various other kindred interludes in my
bachelor life. I had liked the r61e of a consolee and I
had no intention of abandoning it. I had still to grasp

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the fact that Dolores was a remarkable as well as a
conspicuous woman and that she had formed a swift
but very tenacious resolution to devote her life to me
or, to be more precise, to assimilate my life to herself.
For me she was an adventure but for her I was an
acquisition. It was only gradually I realized how
thoroughly I was being embraced when I was being
embraced.

I could not tell the history of the next few weeks of
intimacy with Dolores even if I had the will to do so.
The record is obliterated. Nature has at least had the
wisdom to make me anticipate honeymoon details very
vividly and to forget them very thoroughly. Now
that I find myself setting down my case of Stephen
Wilbeck contra Dolores I am astonished at the
extremely poor quality of the evidence produced by
my one and only witness, myself. And yet the pub-
lisher of Otto Jenson’s Reality of Evidence ought to
have known better. Jenson deals chiefly with the
reporting of events by intelligent unbiased people,
circumstantial accounts of what they saw of conjuring
entertainments, impromptu dramatic scenes and
so on, and he stresses how widely they can differ upon
quite vital particulars. He gives less material because
he could amass less material about cases where bias
was plainly in operation or where evidence was
moulded by question and cross-examination. The
hidden operation of self-love and self-deception he does
not investigate. But his book demonstrates how
enormously we can vary our conceptions, our quite

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honest convictions, of what happened a few hours
before. And I am trying to tell not about material
facts but of what went on in my mind and why I did
this and not that, thirteen years ago. I doubt if one
could do as much for last Sunday. I contemplate a
considerable number of spoilt sheets, a certain amount
of torn paper in the waste-paper basket, and suddenly
I begin to be amused.

There are times when I find myself as amusing to
watch as anybody or anything. I perceive a little chap
who is still clinging to the assurance that he was some-
thing exceptional as a lover. It is nature’s way with us.
Few men, I suspect, can resist that dear delusion that
the commonest of God’s gifts is an outstanding
distinction. Yet it is lavished upon the ordinary
monkey far beyond our human portion. The facts
of the case necessarily remain in a decent obscurity,
but I think that in that particular respect my head was
rather turned by Dolores. I was, I found for the first
time in my life, a tremendous dog. I was a great
fellow. I was an outstanding specialist. Casanova
certainly wasn’t in it with me. I do remember shame-
fully a sort of triumph I felt over the manifest and
manifestly impotent rivalry of the little translator
man and still more shamefully my appreciation of a
sort of envy that mingled with the rich sympathy of
cousin John.

These are subtle matters. Even setting them down
makes them glare atrociously. But they are a necessary
part of the story. Perhaps if one could tint the paper

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

of a book grey, deepening in tone until at last the text
quivered on the verge of the absolutely illegible ~ .

A lot better than a line of stars.

I must think over that idea of an Almost Illegible
Series. I should return to a rather paler page and
distinctive type with the fact that I also got a
tremendous kick out of the suggestion that I had in me
a kind of mental and moral greatness which made her
ungrudging sacrifices to me a duty as well as a delight.
She had been so aimless she said. She elaborated the
details of her past aimlessness for quite long stretches.
This aimless emotional Diana had done a lot of vsrild
shooting and she dilated upon it with a regretful
gusto. She had, she said, tried love, religion, patriotism
in three or four countries, and the Communist party.
She had tried art, poetry, literature with a sort of
superficial intensity. All had failed to satisfy her deep
physical and spiritual needs. Now in me and my great
idea she found something virile, aggressive, promising
and sustaining. My great idea was in fact in its new
explicitness almost as new to me as it was to her, and I
too found it stimulating. The more I considered it, the
more I was disposed to make the firm of Bradfield,
Clews and Wilbeck live up to it. How gladly in the
measure of her abilities, said she, would she give her
life to that. Fraulein Kettner was presently infected by
her excitement and she produced a more nordic, more
Icontralto, but equally enthusiastic, response.

I think these two streaks of gratification and exalt-
ation were the main strands in the situation that was

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wrapping about me. And I know that at the same
time I was acutely ashamed of myself. I did not want
any audience to fan my smouldering self-disapproval.
I liked Dolores to say all this stuff to me, but I hated
to see her going off to tell it over to other people, and
so perhaps I stuck rather markedly to her side to
minimize her opportunities for overflow. That had a
gratifying appearance of devotion. And in order to get
her away from those others I professed a violent desire
to be with her alone. I clung to an insistence upon
the urgent need there was for me in England but at
the same time I pressed — for the little time more I
could snatch from that imperative duty - for isolation.
So we went, all three of us, to a little inn near Vence,
with myself of course as host.

I forget the dispersal of the party at the Hotel
Pension Malta et Syracuse, nor even where my cousin
and his wife went, and I am not very clear now about
the details of that Vence establishment except that
from it came a profound conviction that whatever
other music is the food of love it is certainly not the
shrill pipe of the mosquito. On the contrary. I
couldn’t stand the damned things. The landlord, his
wife, his sister-in-law, the general servant, the man
who pretended to be a garagist, and a large ambiguous
woman in black who was probably a perennial
pensionnaire, were all told about the peculiar passion
and beauty of our relationship. Hitherto I had never
met a woman who liked a chorus to her love-making.
But Dolores has a craving for a chorus. Like her over-

97

G

APROPOS OF DOLORES

emphasis, her high-pitched roice, her emphatic make-
up, her assertive taste in dress, it arises, I believe, from
some deep doubt in her whether indeed she is really alive .

I am, I repeat, quite unable to say now whether I
was what is called ‘in love’ with her. But then I have
never been able to determine what ‘in love’ really
means. In some ways I liked her immensely. I played
up to her. Apart from her stimulating appreciation,
her talk, which had still to become a boring flow of
obviously imitative second-rate social and cultural
stuff, could be bright and amusing. She looked - and
even listened more at that time and she talked less
automatically. Her rather vividly coloured and rather
overdrawn autobiographical material was novel then
and entertaining. It retained the freshness of early
impressions. It had pleasing variations. Her pose of a
profound and habitual pessimism was in abeyance
in those early days. Sometimes she had real gaiety
about herself - even nowadays rarely and uncertainly,
she can be gay. And she could be unconsciously funny,
which is always an endearing trait to me. The rites of
passion would be suspended for five minutes while she
danced round the room flicking a wet towel, giving
ultimately successful battle to an intrusive mosquito
and cursing in several languages. ‘Peeng, would you?
Damn you!’ Flick. ‘Aaah! Got you, my gentleman!’
And then back in the most businesslike way to caresses.

She practised some marvellous exercises which I
gathered were a combination of the best Swedish drill
with the finer usages of yoga mysticism. They were

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

well worth watching. Dolores in a state of nature
holding her breath in an effort to send air by some
entirely un^fcnown route to her spinal cord and at the
same time bursting to explain the esoteric wonder of it,
was an exhilarating spectacle. I would say innocent
but provocative things and she would gesticulate
fiercely for silence. As if some yogi was listening and
might overhear and stop the influence.

She had a sort of wildly inaccurate savoir-faire about
food and wine, about dress and about social usage, that
in those days, had not lost its freshness for me and
seemed unlikely then to entangle or embarrass me in
any way whatever.

But the business was calling me. The idea of
turning our firm into a definitely educational organ-
ization which her first enthusiasm had helped to
foster, was urging me to return. Something primitive,
something lying not so very deeply beneath her crust
of strange emphatic affectations, came up when I spoke
definitely of departure. I realized with a shock how
strongly, blindly and unreasonably she did not want
me to go. She had no right whatever to hamper my
going, but plainly without any acting or pretending
she was going to be hurt, and I am a coward about hurt-
ing people. Abruptly our skies were shot with
contention. I stayed on for two grudged days after the
date I had fixed for departure and all the time she was
extorting a promise that I would return, and she was
trying to pin me to a date. I hate making promises
because I have a strong tendency to keep them.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

She staged a great parting scene at Nice station,
Fraulein Kettner as choragus to a group of porters and
fellow passengers, and I had some difficulty in dispel-
ling a proposal that she should come on with me as far
as Marseilles. And I sat back in my compartment an
extremely perplexed and promise-saddled young man.

Our gay little one-act play was over but the curtain
had refused to come down. Expectation remained in
possession of the empty stage.

§7

Never had I realized so fully the intensity of my
desire to touch life with a light hand. I had told
Dolores no lies, I had been quite as much the wooed
as the wooer in our affair, and I felt this invisible
thread of a promise she had put upon me, as an almost
intolerable imposition. Nobody, I told myself, has
the right to thrust this sort of obligation upon a fellow
creature. Why on earth should I go back simply
because she wanted me to go back?

Only it seems to be the human way to thrust
obligations upon others. I remember sitting in my
compartment and thinking of life as a wild scramble
to entangle and get away, a fantastic arena of struggling
people with lassoes, hooks, crooks, nets, adhesive
ribbons, chains, handcuffs. My mind would admit no
possibility of mutual enslavement and I held myself
aloof from the general scrimmage, the cravings of

lOO

THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

possessive love have never arisen to me. And when
presently I went along to the dining car I watched the
grouping of my fellow-passengers with a new interest.
Did neither of the married couple in the corner feel
trapped and held? Was even that mother ministering
to her three noisy children content to have lost her
freedom? The young couple with their backs to me
might be a returning honeymoon. Their poses sug-
gested the extremity of detachment possible in indis-
soluble matrimony.

I kept my promise and went back to Dolores^ but
now the sense of a tugging leash between us was very
present in my mind. The Kettner lady had returned
to Switzerland and photography, and Dolores and I
occupied a small furnished house she had found be-
tween Nice and Antibes. The flavour of matrimony
in our relationship was growing stronger.

I married her because she declared she was going
to have a child. To this day I cannot determine
whether she really played a deliberate trick upon me
or if she contrived to deceive herself also about her
condition. I knew that she was possessed by an inflex-
ible resolve to hold me permanently and that she was
quite capable of a device of that sort. Did she not love
me and does not love justify everything? She had
assured me at an early stage of our relations that she
was a barren woman but all that was now forgotten.
The very intensity of her desire may have induced a
belief in her own mind.

I am not very good at checking facts against what

lOl

APROPOS OF DOLORES

people tell me. I should have made a pitiful detective.
Whatever the reahties of the case were, the appearances
W'ere of a dismayed woman facing quite tragic pos-
sibilities. Abortion in France is a thing not merely
illegal but intolerably unclean; it was hardly
mentioned between us. She seemed to be extra-
ordinarily alone. She was an only child^ her parents
were dead, and she seemed to have none but casual
friends, recently acquired. Most of her previous lovers
and friends she must have consumed; there were none
left; but this did not strike me as significant at the time.
I felt that this unexpected lapse into fecundity was my
misfortune just as much as hers, and that our obligation
to our prospective child was equal.

At that time I had no very definite ideas of how
and where I should live. The lease of that old house
at Durthing expired in another year or so, the place
was associated with Alice and I had no particular wish
to preserve those associations. I could give that up
quite easily. In London I had a flat at the top of our
business house in Carrington Square and this and two
or three clubs made a foothold for me there rather than
a home. It would be quite possible to set up a house-
hold with Dolores almost anywhere we chose. My
thoughts ranged widely. I passed through a phase of
indecision and then my imagination took control.

It did miracles in the way of adjustment to the new
situation.

In the absence of Dolores it was possible for me to
think out a r 61 e for her that would have vanished

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

instantly in her presence. I thought of her as really
subduing herself to co-operate with me in the schemes
of educational expansion that pullulated in my mind.
For some time like various other young Enghsh
publishers I had had my eye on the continental market
for English books. Tauchnitz, that honest and enter-
prising old monopolist, had been and was still hampered
as an ‘ex-enemy’. I had been looking into the
possibility of an office in Paris. Now suddenly I
perceived the attractiveness of a home in Paris,
presided over by a startlingly exotic but really very
intelligent and sympathetic wife. The child and a
nursery would sober her down, I should sober her
down, security would sober her down. It is amazing
what anticipation can do with a person who is not
present to hamper the imaginative play. I imagined a
Dolores-Stephen baby - quite a brilliant little thing,
mercurial indeed but with all my virtues. Several such
prodigies. I remember distinctly a reverie to that
effect. The letters I had from Dolores at that time
were all asseverations of devotion. Her one anxiety
was the fear least our child should interfere with her
complete devotion to my interests. Far better would
a Paris menage be than any establishment in London
or the English country. It would have an atmosphere
all its own, and in that at least I was not mistaken.
Every writer and all the younger critics, American
and British alike, passed through Paris. One could
catch them there and get them isolated as one could
never do in London, bring them into contact with the

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

new movements that were stirring - rather sluggishly
at that time - among the younger Frenchmen.

A very hopeful phase indeed it was. Why had no
other publisher thought of running the world from
Paris? I conjured up a pleasant version of a definitely
cosmopolitan Wilbeck, quite a fine figure^ able to
overcome, by virtue of this definitely Parisian domicile,
most of that deep subconscious antagonism that bars
out so many generous possibilities of co-operation
between British and American writers. Dolores,
more and more modified to fit into the picture, a
sobered and dignified Dolores, was to preside over all
this.

Time and tide wait for no one. Dolores’ condition
had to be considered. The sooner we married now the
better. I came back to France and we married un-
obtrusively at the Nice consulate. There was a shyness
about it all in my mind and I wanted the marriage
unobtrusive. An old friend of hers who ran a costume
shop in Cairo joined her and I caught Redmond
Napier who happened to be in Cannes to play the role
of fourth witness. And the effusive tenderness of
Dolores for me was wonderful. She was unusually
silent 5 she seemed preoccupied, she seemed less
painted. She brooded and what could be more
appropriate. She had something of the gravity of
Mary in an Annunciation picture. But she was also
extremely amorous. She was greatly distressed when
I wanted to go back to England to make sure that
everything was going well at Durthing but not so

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

distressed as she had been before. ‘Now/ she said, ‘I
am sure you will come back.’

I wrote to her every day while I was in England^
establishing a precedent that has since become an iron
law. Things had got a little dislocated at Durthing
and I had to stay longer than I had anticipated, three
weeks or more, so far as I can remember.

And then the child began to evaporate. A sort of
annunciation in reverse occurred. Dolores wrote that
she was ill, extraordinarily ill. She wrote long letters
daily. Nothing was going as it should have gone.
She became tragic, she became inconsolable. The hope,
the lovely hope, that had filled her, was dispelled. She
had been cheated. From some of her phrases it seemed
almost as though she accused me of cheating her. She
had a growth. It was a growth, malignant in spirit if
not in substance. She was ill, probably dying of cancer,
frustrated, robbed of a woman’s supreme happiness,
her life a futility, a heart-rending failure. She clam-
oured for me to come to Nice and comfort her - for
it might not be for long that I should have that
opportunity.

When I disengaged myself from various complica-
tions at Durthing and went to her I found her
passionately reproachful. Why had I not come earlier?
Leaving her, my newly married wife, to die in pain
and solitude. In a lonely hotel - heart-broken. Who
but an Englishman - this was a new note - could treat
a woman so?

For a dying woman she did not seem to me to be

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

very greatly changed, except that she had acquired
several bright and becoming wraps for my reception
and was wearing little else. I was afraid to hurt her
in any way but she assured me she could best forget her
sufFerings in love. For most of the time she did forget
them. Now and then however she would remember
them and, at the most unexpected moments, emit a
short, sharp cry of anguish. ‘My pain,’ she would
explain. ‘Oh my pain!’ For a few moments there
would be a pause and then life would be resumed
again. Her pain has never really left her from that
time onward. It has remained the same spasmodic
inconsequent interruption. It leads to nothing.

Later we consulted a distinguished specialist.

‘And how is she really?’ I asked him when I had
him alone.

‘Madame,’ he said, ‘is of a highly nervous type.’

‘Will there be any need of an operation?’

He shut his mouth so that it showed its maximum
width, half closed his eyes and shook his head slowly
from side to side.

‘I am much relieved,’ I said.

‘Naturally,’ he said with the utmost gravity. . . .

§8

In this manner it was that I married. I married to
become the father of a prospective child, which turned
out to be a volatile form of cancer and ended in an
occasional spasm. I know that matters followed in

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

that order but I am totally unable to recall to anything
like reality the sequence of moods^ the mental and
moral goings to and fro, that must have occurred during
that definitive period of my life. I suspect that I must
have liked Dolores in those eventful days much more
than I do now — by spells anyhow — and certainly so
far as I can remember I took her word unsuspiciously.

I believe what I am told too readily. There is a
streak of vanity in me that dislikes and dismisses the
idea that anyone can cheat me. And partly also there
is an element of laziness that shirks the trouble of
scrutiny.

I certainly tried to settle down in this unanticipated
life. I think that having shouldered my obligations I
did make an attempt to play the constant lover to her.
I tried my hand at little attentions, gifts, pet names and
flattering phrases. By acting a r61e one may become
that rdle. But, it is a queer thing, I never accustomed
myself to call her ‘darling’ or ^dearest’ easily. A nick-
name I found seemed always more sincere. I was shy
of all positive declarations to her. I found myself in
Paris trying to achieve a way of living with her, but
my recollections of these early years insist on remaining
in an inconsecutive jumble. Our behaviour towards
each other changed but rather after the fashion of
February weather, which is bright one day and stormy
the next.

I suppose a vast majority of married people, and
particularly those who come out of different classes or
different countries, go through this intricate, repetitive,

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

intermittent process of imperfect mutual discovery and
imperfect compromise. I suppose I arrived almost
unawares - the impression is built up by a thousand
touches - at the realization that this creature to whom
I was mated could never in any sense be mine or any
part of an amplified or enriched me, could never be
more than an inseparable alien auxiliary, always on
guard against me, always to be treated with a self-
protective, watchful disingenuousness, the last person
in the world for bare confidences. So it must happen
in countless cases.

And this absolute disappearance of abandon may
have no deliberate quality of planned treachery on
either side. We pass unheedingly from phase to phase.
I believe quite firmly that at first Dolores threw herself
into her fantasy of imminent motherhood in good
faith 5 I believe she really saw herself as a devoted
adherent of my aims and ambitions. I still hold to that.
Only when she found herself married and installed
in our fine large apartment in the Avenue Mitani,
other more vivid and attractive imaginations just
ousted these earlier dreams.

With a completeness — !

Since those early enthusiasms Dolores has dis-
regarded my business, flouted my business and never
hesitated to distract me from it. Since our prospective
child passed its recessive phase, leaving nothing but a
few incidental stabs of pain within call, my business
has been nothing to her but a rival. Sometimes indeed
she makes a great bragging before her friends, and

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

giving away my private vanities and my hidden
ambitions, proclaims how influential my group of
writers is becoming and how rich we are. (Really
we are not^ the firm has grown big and muscular but
I see to it that it secretes no fat.) Generally however
when she turns a lunch or dinner party into an exhibi-
tionist orgy, I figure as the ruthless man of steel and
success, hard even in his vices, who has enslaved her
sensitive and suffering and once so brilliant personal-
ity. In spite of everything I have done to her, she
declares all down the table, obliterating every
intermediate conversation, she loves me still. And so
on.

For some reason I recall a mood in these early years
very clearly. It survives like some letter in an old
correspondence that has escaped a general burning. I
see myself walking through our apartment one after-
noon, I should think about May or June in 1922 or
possibly 25. It was certainly our first year of
married life. I must have come back to Paris by an
earlier plane or train than I had said and she was out.
Either the servants had taken my things or they were
still in the hall. I was looking at her furniture and
thinking her over.

How entirely I was out of harmony with this house-
hold of mine had never been so plain to me before. I
felt an alien, a paying guest. This was not my home^
it was the home, it was ruthlessly the home of Dolores.
Whatever unformed desire for a home I had had, had
been overridden. An obstinate, incesssant will, none

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

the less effective because it was narrow, limited and
unimaginative, had set itself to frame a living place for
me in which the long, loose, unencumbered activities
that are the substance of my life, were resisted, de-
flected, broken up and frustrated at every turn.

Even my bureau was not my own. Dolores had
successfully given me one of those great pompous
writing desks without which the portrait of no French
man of letters is complete. On it are massive brass
lions with a sort of inverted top hats and holes for
great candles bored into their heads, and a vast brass
inkstand - I use a fountain pen - and a stupendous
brass paper-weight. Its drawers all have bellies and at
every angle where anything is to be caught there is
that gilt brass stuff, which English people call ormolu.
There is an equally impressive book-case behind this
writing desk; stylistically not so much a brother to it
as a distant cousin, bellying still more opulently - and
the drawers below open freely only to some password
still unknown to me. Though at times in my haste I
try quite a lot. Both these pieces are much too large
for the room and practically I live between them and
the wall. Over the fireplace is a vast mirror and an
armless twisted nude in plaster, and further, to
emphasize what Dolores considers the virile note, there
are paintings of meaty young women in a state of
frank self-exposure on the opposite wall. And when
we have a party, men are expected to litter their hats
and coats all over this snuggery.

This bureau was furnished as a complete surprise

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

for me while I was in England. It was a surprise, but
I did not protest.

‘It strikes a man’s note/ she said when she intro-
duced me. ‘I know you like nothing elegant. But
this has a sensuous gravity. It is like you. . .

I suppose a man can learn a lesson from any
picture that is made of him. But I still cannot trace
this particular likeness.

I have always had a bias for the pose of Democritus.
I do my best to ease life with laughter. Even now, as
I recall that dazed exploration of my own home I am
amused.

I surveyed my drawing-room from various points
of view, standing at one point for a minute or so, and
then trying it from another. From any point of view
it was unadulterated, invincible Dolores. It was
preposterous how completely I was not in evidence.
It was funny, ‘Good old Dolores!’ I whispered.

This was the room to which I was to invite rising
authors, publicists, men and women of ideas, for the
gravest, most fruitful of discussions. . . .

It was quite a big room with three great windows
opening on the little Parc Mitani. Two round pillars
sustaining a cornice broke its length. The style was
roughly speaking, Empire-Louis-Quinze-Oriental
Bazaar with supplementary Modern Maple and an
overpowering flavour of exhibitionism. It was not
furnished to live in^ it was furnished for Dolores to
show off to her friends, to explain to her friends, to
triumph with over her friends.

Ill

APROPOS OF DOLORES

In one corner was a great bowl in which Chinese
gold-fish swam gravely and sadly through life, sports
and marvels, distended and twisted, trailing strange
fringes. Everywhere there were little tables, life-size
tables and dwarfish Moorish tables in inlay and bronze,
a couple of sofas, easy chairs to be sat in easily, gilt
chairs to be sat on gingerly, dangerous chairs on which
exotic fabrics had been draped, there were oriental
rugs on the shining parquet floor and oriental rugs
crept up the walls. There was not a table, not a
horizontal surface anywhere, that did not carry its
burthen of bibelots, little unworthy pots, boxes, images,
carvings, witnessing that in every age Satan has found
some artistry still for idle hands to do. Little queer
rare-looking books lay about, books no one would ever
dream of looking at, or rather they did not so much lie
about as lie where they had been put. None of this
stuff was really interesting or curious. None of it had
personal associations with either of us. None of it was
rare^ it was all to be found in limitless repetition in
the shops of the Rue Faubourg St.-Honore and of its
interminable sisters and cousins. It was just Dolores’
idea of a proper background for our social life.

Hanging rather too high - as all pictures are hung
in France - were various works of art - only one or two
at that time, for Dolores had still to taste the joys of the
not too extravagant patronage of the not too competent
painter. There was an amateurish picture of the Hotel
Pension Malta bought on the front at Cannes, and two
of those life studies in which the last thing of import-

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

ance is the face. For Dolores pictorial art means only-
one thing; the human body wrong way up. Pianos,
thank God, there were none, for she hates music
intensely as a rival. Her impulse is always to rustle
and talk it down. Every light was shaded pink. And
over everything there hung, there has always hung,
a faint elusive flavour of incense, of pastilles, of recent
battles and duels of perfume.

I sniffed, grunted, and went slowly to my other
state apartment, my dining-room.

There also I was in an alien atmosphere. The room
was generally sombre mahogany and upright. It was
eminently fitted for that occasional serious eating and
drinking which enlivens the habitually sane French
dietary. But the jackdaw in Dolores had broken out
over the sideboard in a clustering constellation of
miscellaneous plates, all pretending to be specimens
of great interest and beauty and dominated by a vast
majolica plaque insisting upon the Rape of the
Sabines, but always recalling to my mind, I don’t know
why - the rondeurs I suppose - that bustling cheese
market at Alkmaar.

A small table by the -window displayed all Dolores’
best tea-cups and saucers. They had to be shown some-
where. There was also an elegant little ewer and basin
on that table, happily the only surviving pieces of a set.

I turned back to that entangled drawing-room.

‘Exhibitionism,’ I whispered. ‘Incurable exhibi-
tionism. . . .’

Pause.

H 113

APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘How the hell did I ever let myself get here?’ I
asked.

And presently answered my own question feebly.
‘One damned thing led to another.’

I became aware of Dolores in the hall. I walked a
few paces to meet her tempestuous inrush.

‘Dolores/ 1 said, ‘I’ve been thinkingover this room.’

‘Well?’ she said alert for praise.

‘You ought to mark the prices of everything in
plain figures.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s like a bazaar.’

‘There is an oriental touch/ she agreed looking
round with self-approval. ‘A richness. Variety. It is a
necessary part of my personality.’

‘You don’t think that for everyday purposes it is
just a leetle crowded and confused?’

‘It is vivid - animated. It is chic. What else could
you expect? Everyone admires it. Even your stupid
English friends when they come in^ open their eyes. . . .
But you have just arrived, my dear! You have not
even got yourself a whisky-soda. Ah! I have another
surprise for you this time — in your room. No. I will
not tell you. I want you to be surprised.’

§9

Maybe that afternoon stands out in my mind
because it was then I first realized the full dimensions
of the task I had undertaken in assimilating Dolores.

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

And with diminishing persistence and an entire want
of success I have been trying to assimilate her ever
since. But I did not realize until last night that it has
been going on for thirteen years.

In a clumsy way and with a good deal of incon-
sistency I have, all things considered, tried pretty
hard to work out a method of living with her which
would give us a real married life, that would neither
obliterate me nor involve impossible suppressions for
her. My efforts have never been properly planned nor
steadfastly pursued because my attitude towards her
has never been steady. Sometimes I have thought her
a lark, sometimes I have thought of her as a nuisance 5
at times she has seemed incidental^ at times she has
seemed fundamental. Even if she had wanted to
consider me I should have puzzled her.

A larger circle of old friends than I thought she
possessed gathered about her. Even old schoolmates
from Monte Carlo, now actively settled in Paris,
appeared. They were all competitively smart and
self-conscious j they loved to talk about the great world
intimately at the tops of their voices. For the first time
I realized the tremendous importance early friends and
old familiar associates may play in a woman’s life.
She did not love nor respect any of these people, but
their reluctant approval, their admiration and envy
were primary necessities to her existence. Their
influence, the dogmas they laid down about clothing,
servants, money and behaviour gave the patterns of
her life.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Reflecting upon this it seemed reasonable to me in
those early years to assume that if I introduced a
number of people of a different type and particularly
English people with manifestly different sets of values,
if in fact I changed her audience, she would change
her performance to correspond. But though Dolores
can pick up things very readily, she never forgets.
She adds to herself, but early influences come first.
And I am much too simple and she was much too quick,
to give this attempt to change the atmosphei'e a chance.
She detected and resented an implicit criticism from
the outset. Her defensive mechanisms were alert at
once.

I cut a foolish figure in these ill-conceived and
half-hearted attempts at - c?^-Dolorification. They
did not modify her^ they intensified her. How was it
that I could have imagined that she, whose essential
life it is to pose herself and brag, could possibly be
assimilated to. a sort of life which has subtilized posing
and bragging out of sight? I got people I knew to visit
us in Paris, I took her for a tour to Scotland and I
managed several long week-end visits at country
houses in England. It is difficult now to count up how
much of this sort of thing I did or to fix any precise
dates. A publisher nowadays shares something of the
social opportunities of the literary man, so many
fingers of good family are inky now, and she shared
many of my invitations. She was an aggressive,
exasperating and disconcerting visitor for any hostess
to entertain. She was on the defensive offensive from

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

the start. She set herself with loud cries and startling
costumes to shock, challenge and dazzle. She wasn’t
going to be taught anything by these people^ she was
going to overwhelm them. She was a terrible nuisance,
but at times I must confess she was a lark. I must
already have been getting rather tired of her monologue
by the second or third year of our marriage and also I
could never reconcile myself to her disposition to
clamour to a roomful or a tableful of people about her
intimate, even the most intimate, relations with me.
Yet for all that, there was a kind of refreshment of her
original shockingness, when I brought her, all unpre-
faced, into some typically Anglican gathering, that
had its amusing side.

At Clinton Towers, I remember, we arrived early
and lunched with the family, governess and the three
girls included. Dolores was inspired to talk about
Sappho and the recent suppression of a book called
The Well of Loneliness, She became so explicit that
suddenly Mam’selle uttered a short sharp cry and —
leaving plates of food unfinished - swept her charges
from the room.

Wow;,’ said Lady Garron, rather grimly I thought,
‘’now we can talk freely.’

Dolores continued unruffled.

And also I recall a vivid question she asked some
ex-missionary bishop, I forget where. Always when
she gets hold of a missionary. Catholic or Protestant,
she pins him down to an explicit cross-examination
upon the question of native marriage customs and the

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Christian insistence upon decent clothing. Through
a momentary lull in the conversation I heard her
asking: ‘Tell me now, bishop, frankly^ what is it you
want to hide - is it deficiency or excess?’

Dolores finds the clergy almost as stimulating as
they find her. I recall another occasion when I was
smitten by a high-pitched ecclesiastical voice crying
in evident distress. ‘I had much rather not discuss this
question any further.’

I never found out what that question was nor what
it was made old Lord Synagogue at a lunch party in
Paris assure her with tremulous emphasis: ‘A Voman
of your sort vould haf bin stoned in Israel. She vould
haf bin stoned.^ Some little confidence I suppose.

From first to last Dolores never attuned her
costume to the country house atmosphere nor would
she listen to any suggestions on the matter. ‘My dear
Steenie,’ she would say, ‘you are a bourgeois, you are
a bookseller, a tradesman. You do not understand
these things. From a Frenchwoman - and to them I
am a Frenchwoman - something special is expected.’

They certainly got something special. To her sort
of people in Paris, the English country house, is still a
legendary land. To Dolores it remained a legendary
land even when she was in it. ‘Le sport’ is supposed to
prevail exhorbitantly and feminine costume had to be
adapted with a certain coquetry to the sporting idea.
Moreover Britain is supposed to be the land of ‘le
plaid’. So I treasure among my memories a lively
picture of Dolores making an entry from the house

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

upon the great terrace at Shonts somewhere towards
midday, in a marvellous version of a highlander’s
costume in Stewart tartan, kilt and sporran quite
faithfully rendered and an eagle’s feather in the velvet
bonnet. And another occasion when the theme
chosen was a very large metal-buttoned red redingote
with a velvet peaked cap, is also very vivid with me
still. The afternoons had a voluptuous ‘tea-gown’
phase with great rings and necklaces and brooches and
bangles and bangles.

‘But my dear Steenie!’ she said, when I tried to
undermine this idea. ‘Tea-gown is an English word.
Tea-gown is an English thing. If these other women
do not wear one, it is because they do not even know
how to be smart in their own country. You do not
understand these things. You nevaire will. You
know nothing of this life of chic and leisure here.
Naturally. It is not your milieu. If you were to come
to this house a month later you would find all these
women in tea-gowns like mine.’

‘And do you think it is usual to wear all those
bangles and rings and jewellery with a tea-gown?’

‘It is what I do,’ said Dolores. ‘It is my style.’

She not only made these remarkable adjustments
to our social English atmosphere but she affected a
patently insincere interest in games. Her schooldays
had ended just a little before the invasion of the convent
schools by tennis, but she never realized how inexpert
she was. She had a belief that presently in a moment
she would get the knack of the game. It was a matter

“9

APROPOS OF DOLORES

of great difficulty for hostesses to keep her high heels
off the courts. ‘But I do not mind playing in my heels/
she would expostulate. I did at last make her believe
that she looked better in very chic white shoes and a
gipsy silk handkerchief about her black hair. She
would pounce upon a partner. ‘You shall play with me.’
A great favour. She moved with an active angularity
that was practically independent of the ball. Her grip
on the racquet was strange, a sort of forthright up-
holding.

‘Do not tell me/ she would cry. ‘Do not show me!
Let me play in my own way. . . .

'There! I have hit it. ... You see? I hit it. . . .
Why did you tell me I could not hit it this way?’

From the sidelines she took possession of the game.
She distributed praise and blame. She never ceased
to give advice and urge the players to greater exertions.
‘Brav-0’ she would cry, ‘Brav-0’ and make a swift,
sudden and disconcerting clapping with her hands.
She liked the ball to go high. She liked it to go far.
Many players found her applause ill-timed.

‘Steenie, you are playing badly. Play faster,"*
Then perhaps she would lapse for a time into mere
social talk. I remember hearing her tell Lady Garron,
who I believe was some sort of county champion:
‘When tennis is properly played, you do not even see
the ball.’

‘But then you do not often see it properly played,’
said Lady Garron.

‘But even as you play it here, I find it amusing,’

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

said Dolores in her best great-lady style. ‘Why, after
all, should one play like a paid professional? It is a
game.’

§ lo

It must have been after four or five years of this
sort of life that my disposition to get away from
Dolores began to dominate my resolve to establish
some sort of modus vivendi with her. Perhaps it was
a little later. I cannot be certain. But I think it must
have been round about nineteen twenty-six or twenty-
seveti that I began to scheme temporary escapes from
her of a more elaborate sort than my little business
trips of a fortnight or three weeks to London and
Durthing. It was impossible for me to see people in
Paris without her, but gradually I developed a private
life of my own in London into which she did not enter.

Gradually I eliminated London from her pro-
gramme. When it became plain that London was
getting on her mind I would take her off to the
Riviera or Rome or Oslo. And twice we had rough
Channel crossings. Even on a rough Channel crossing
Dolores suffered with outstanding distinction. It was
a revelation. She made the most of it. But to be quite
the sickest woman on a Channel boat is not really a
triumphant memory. It left her with a diminished
appetite for social triumph in Britain. And then in my
schemes for book-selling on the continent I found it

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

necessary to take a tour in Germany. She was still too
vociferously full of war propaganda to want to go with
me, and I had a pleasant time in Munich^ Leipzig^
Vienna, Berlin and Zurich. I went by air - in order I
assured her to quicken my return. She was much
opposed to my using the air services^ she had an exag-
gerated idea of the dangers overhead and insisted upon
a reassuring telegram^ sain et sauf^ tendresse^ from
every airport. For her own part she said the sea was
bad enough. If ever she found herself in an aeroplane
she would, she declared, jump out. Probably she would.
But I could never get her into an aeroplane. It
dawned upon me that business trips by air might be a
very convenient way of repossessing myself of my
freedom.

I developed this idea. I found business to take me
to Oslo and Stockholm and Finland. I planned a
bolder escape to America. She fought that, but I
got away. I almost weakened to let her come as far as
New York with me, but her dread of the sea deterred
her. One of her friends happily had been sick the
whole way across and the experience lost nothing in
the telling. ‘Not even for you,’ she said. Wo.’

I felt my humbug was improving on each occasion.
I instructed the wireless operator to send a daily radio
all the way across and I gave him six variations,
‘Triste’, ‘Mer houleuse’, Tluie’, ‘Quelle banalitd’,
‘Temps sevfere’, and ‘Je pense a toi’, each followed by
the obligatory ‘tendresse’.

And then I managed India. I got away with eleven

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

weeks, but that was my maximum absence. I was
also beginning to stretch my trips to England. I had
cast a longing look at Australia, for there one might
travel for weeks, no letters possible and only an
occasional radio; I had even thrown out some pre-
paratory hints, but by that time Dolores was already
developing her present fever of suspicion and jealousy.
At first I think she had found a certain release and
relief in these lengthening absences of mine from
Paris. It gave her little freedoms. There I was safely
out of the way. I was a grand passion and all that, no
lover was like me, but also I was a restraint. Then
something set her counting the days when I was away.
She realized that I was contriving a sort of fractional
distillation of myself out of her life.

The more I was away from her and rested from
her, the more alien and uninteresting and uncongenial
I found her on my return. Whatever else she did when
I was away she certainly acquired no new ideas and no
new tricks. She seemed to be becoming less lively and
more implacably quarrelsome. She had lost flexibility.
The closer one came to her vanity the harder and spikier
it seemed. And a certain hard maliciousness became
more and more evident to me. Gradually year by
year it was more definitely established in my mind
that I wanted to get away from her just as much as
possible. At first I had a little deceived myself about
that. I had contrived to feel I liked her and still found
her entertaining. Now I planned deliberately to
establish barriers between our lives. My social life in

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

England increased in interest and that I felt I must
conceal from her.

Rather less than four years ago I did a foolish
thing. My social contacts in London were increasing
and I felt the need for a more commodious establish-
ment, completely detached from the business. But I
did not want Dolores to invade that. So without telling
her I transferred myself to my present flat in Alden-
ham Square. Her letters I thought could still go to
Carrington Square. This was a fatuous undignified
trick to play, though I thought it amusing at the time,
and before three months were out someone had let
out the sinister secret. From that time onward her
jealousy has been a spreading flame.

I took her over to see how harmless the place was,
but she failed altogether to see how harmless it was.
This,’ said she, ‘is a garconnibre, nothing less.’

In Paris, in her world, there is no such thing as an
innocent garconnifere.

‘You are the first and only compromising visitor,’
I said.

‘Bah!’ she cried.

‘But does it look like a garconnibre? Does it smell
like one? Is there a cushion or a mirror or a hairpin
in the place?’

She stooped and picked up a hairpin, and handed
it to me gravely^ ^ There mister Steeniel’

‘Point for you,’ said I. ‘That noble piece of old
ironwork comes from the head of Mrs. Richman.
She arrives every day at eight and stays until twelve.

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THE MARRYING OF DOLORES

You shall have another to-morrow, straight from the
hair. But really that shows you! It is more con-
vincing than nothing. The place you see, hasn’t been
swept for you. Find a fine lady’s hairpin if you can.’

But since then my life has been preposterously
propitiatory. It has made me more attentive and more
enslaved than ever. I try and distract her with treats
and excursions. The big blue car is a direct product of
the Aldingham Square flat. This excursion here
again.

Cars have always been an important aspect of life
for Dolores. They determine a sort of social status in
her world. She took the keenest interest in mine
always and boasted about them to her friends before
she became the proud registered owner of one of her
own. Then for a time she became so car proud that I
do not think she ever set foot to pavement except to
cross it. And her insistence upon the correct be-
haviour of other cars became even more emphatic
than before. For Dolores is a sort of voluntary road
censor. If someone in a passing car sticks out a hand to
point to the view, or swerves at all from the proper
side or flaps things loose or scatters cigarette sparks or
commits any such small impropriety, Dolores’ head
is out of the window in a trice, as we pass, her hands
make denunciating gestures and her voice is lifted in
high-pitched eloquent reproof that goes on long after
the delinquent is out of earshot. Startled sinners hear
that receding voice and, I hope, mend their manners.

125

CHAPTER IV

DOLORES AT T O R Q U S T O L

§1

Dolores’ arrival here had the quality of an important
public event. I had been for a walk before lunch along
the bank of a delightful weed-and- flower-trimmed
artificial water-course that ripples along high up on
the hillside. I had not expected her until the afternoon
but when I returned I found Alphonse and the blue
car, still largely encumbered with Dolores’ luggage,
outside the hotel, and Bayard seated right in the
middle of the entrance turning up his nose at every-
thing and everybody. Various pensionnaires were at
the little tables on the balcony, pretending to take
aperitifs but really memorizing for future digestion
every detail of the car, the luggage, the Pekinese and
Alphonse.

Alphonse I detest. Every human being has a right
to a back and a front and two sides and to have the
back and front curved in a reasonable and proper
manner. But Alphonse is not properly curved 5 he
sticks out behind suddenly as if he wore a bustle. It is
an impertinence and provokes furtive ribaldry and
laughter. And he has a singularly silly large pink
face which also, in my judgment, sticks out, and his
carriage has the rigidity of a waxwork. Dolores insists

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DOLORES AT TORQUJ^STOL

upon his wearing a royal blue uniform with pink
collar and cuffs. The inspection of the pensionnaires
was being very gallantly supplemented by the crowd
of men and boys who sell postcards, straw hats, fans
and suchlike litter, and offer guidance to the various
grottos, lakes, chasms, views, churches, chapels.
Calvaries and so forth, in the neighbourhood, to the
people who come over in charabancs from Morlaix.
The charabancs had still to arrive but were due now
at any moment.

But the general air of the expectant crowd did not
suggest that to-day they were waiting for the chara-
bancs, but for something more individualized. As I
crossed the road towards the hotel I realized that this
something was me. The beam of all their convergent
eyes felt like limelight.

As usual I was quite unprepared for my part. I
walked as unconcernedly as possible. I should have
advanced with a sort of trotting motion and asked, Ts
she here? Is she better?’

A momentary distraction was caused by Bayard,
who yelped sharply as the hotel manager in a state of
hurried effusion - for the charabancs might arrive at
any moment now ~ came out to meet me. Behind him
seethed Marie, Dolores’ maid and rockbottom con-
fidante. I acknowledged the rigid and reproving
salute of Alphonse and turned to encounter the
reproaches of the manager and Marie.

^Madame was so disappointed,’ said the mattre
d’hdtel, ‘not to find you awaiting her.’

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘She is lying down now/ said Marie. ‘She has had
her pain.’

And then from the hotel passage behind them came
a cry of exultation. Dolores in a revealing white wrap
appeared right in the middle of the stage and descended
the steps of the hotel.

‘Madame!’ cried Marie apprehensively.

‘I couldn’t wait for you/ she said. ‘Pain or no
pain. I couldn’t wait. Why did you not stay indoors
for me?’

She flung herself upon me. ‘My darlingV she said.
‘I forgive you.’

I take this sort of thing better than I used to do
but still it abashes me. I struggled out of her clutching
embrace.

I freed myself from her with difficulty and held
her at arms’ length. ‘Let me have a look at you/ I
said, to mitigate the effect of this disentanglement.
‘How much better you look!’

‘I forgive you/ she repeated. ‘I shall always
forgive you.’

She embraced me again with the utmost deter-
mination.

Bayard, who had waddled halfway down the steps
suddenly yapped approval - or disapproval or some-
thing - and sat down, panting a sort of challenge at
the world.

‘Bis! Bis! Bravo!’

The charabancs for the first time in history had
arrived unnoticed and were drawing up in their

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DOLORES AT TORQUJ^STOL

accustomed line opposite the hotel. A rude man in the
foremost charabanc was standing up and applauding us.

I wriggled my head out of her envelopment.

‘Where’s the porter for the luggage?’ I said,
disentangling myself for the second time. ‘Assist
the service, Alphonse. Mobilize yourself.’

The charabancs claimed their meed of attention.
The visitors were scrambling down, unguided, un-
solicited, unprovided with postcards and souvenirs.
This could not go on. Business is business however
attractive the sight of passion in its full maturity may
be.

‘There’s going to be a crowd for lunch,’ I said.
‘I’ll try to reserve a table.’

§2

{Torquestol^ August 2 /\Xhy 1954)

I am angry and at the same time in a ruffled and
resentful way I am amused. I am disposed to laugh at
things, but it is laughter with a split lip. We came
here less than three weeks ago and by this time we
are absurdly at cross-purposes with everyone and,
what is by no means so funny, Dolores and I - in spite
of my private good resolutions that it should never
happen again - are in a state of active conflict upon a
matter in which I am extremely reluctant to give way.

Let me in the calm and stillness of these small
hours make a survey of the present situation. At first
things did not go so badly. But after two or three days

129

1

APROPOS OF DOLORES

of amative intensity Dolores passed into her malignant
phase. She becomes then the most uncomfortable
thing on earth and she avenges herself indiscrimin-
atingly. Troubles arise and thicken. Our present
complex may be divided now roughly into two major
and three minor rows. They are running concurrently
and each one reacts in its own way upon the others, but
the best thing will be to take them so to speak in the
order of their magnitude.

There is first the trouble arising out of the un-
restrained gallantry of Bayard, with the little pet of
the Baroness Snitchy or Schenitzy — I can never get
her name right and the manager does not attempt to
do so. I will call her simply as he does Madame la
Baronne. That began about as soon as we arrived.
For me before the arrival of Dolores, the Baroness was
just a pair of pale eyes looking out from a heavily
powdered face over a small sharp nose, from a corner
table at mealtimes. She had a pale fringe of hair, a
wig I suppose, supporting a small flat lace cap, and she
was wrapped about rather than dressed in creamy and
whitish shawls pinned together. When she walked
out of the salle k manger she became a small, bent
and quivering old lady assisting her movements with
an ebony stick. She is, I now realize, slightly and un-
reliably deaf, and she assists her hearing with a small
silver ear trumpet adorned with white lace. Her little
white Pomeranian was a model of discretion before
Bayard appeared. Then it was a case of love at first
sight.

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DOLORES AT TORQUJ^STOL

But trouble with the Baroness threatened even
before the Bayard incident. On the day of our arrival
we made a rather belated entrance for lunch and while
the distracted maitre d’hdtel was in the kitchen
ordering the special menu indicated for Dolores’
dieting, some excursionists had commandeered the
table I had reserved. It is one of Dolores’ profoundest
convictions that to begin well in an hotel one must be
arrogant, and this seemed as good an opportunity as
any for arrogance. Dolores surveyed the eating
multitude with disdain through her lorgnette. ‘Surely
you could have put a card!’ she said. And then to me,
‘Which table did you reserve, Steenie?’

As I had no intention of throwing out our quite
innocent supplanters by force I decided I had forgotten.
‘One of these,’ I said vaguely.

‘A business man!’ she commented. ‘And he doesn’t
know.’

‘In a moment, madame,’ pleaded the manager, ‘a
table will be free.’

. ‘Which?’ demanded Dolores, sweeping the room
with her glasses, and putting the cowering pleasure-
seekers into their proper relationship to her.

‘One of these,’ said the manager. ‘Will you not
wait a moment on the balcony? And a cocktail perhaps?’

‘I came to this place for rest and solitude,’ said
Dolores. ‘Cocktails are poison,’

‘They are paying at two tables now^^ whispered the
maitre d’hdtel.

Dolores weighed the merits of the tables he seemed

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

to indicate and reflected upon the table manners of her
departing predecessors. ‘We shall need a clean cloth,’
she said.

Then she turned to me. ‘Steenie, give me your
arm. I feel - . I may have my pain. Not even a chair
free.’

By some feat of legerdemain a waitress produced
and put a chair for her. Dolores readjusted it so as to
block the service to the adjacent guests. But a table
was rapidly cleared for us and the hors d’oeuvres put
before us. She forgot her pain. ‘No sardines!’ said
Dolores, surveying the modest display. ‘Naturally, I
desire a sardine. And tunny fish also. . . .’

So importantly we made our ddbut. The old
Baroness, who had hitherto been the Faubourg St.
Germain, so to speak, of the saUe k manger, watched
our proceedings with acute disapproval. She called
the head waiter and speaking with the extreme
audibility of the deaf she indicated Dolores with
her ear trumpet and demanded:

‘Who is she?’

The maitre d’hdtel thought it no harm for us to
hear.

‘Madame Wilbeck, the great English editeur’s
wife,’ I heard. ‘Previously she was a princess.’

It is remarkable how speedily hotels and shop-
keepers learn about Dolores’ title. I never said any-
thing about it - or for the matter of that about my
being a publisher - when I took our rooms, but some-
when in the brief interval between her arrival and

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

my return from my walk our greatness had been
impressed on the manager - presumably by Marie.
As a princess Dolores is, I admit, unconvincing.

^She^s no princess,’ said the Baroness.

‘An Egyptian princess,’ I heard him explaining.

^Quelle princesse!’ exclaimed the Baroness with
amusement and resumed her lunch.

I had done my best to drown that quavering and
yet clear diction by a demand for the wine card.

‘Why do you bother about wines, my dear Steenie?’
asked Dolores. ‘In a place like this they will all be
alike,’

‘I had some quite good claret yesterday,’ I said.

‘Your English judgments! On our wines! It is
part of your national vanity.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I find it endearing,’ she said relentingly. ‘I don’t
blame you, darling.’

I chose a wine, and the sardines and tunny fish
arrived.

‘There will certainly be mosquitoes here,’ said
Dolores, waving her lorgnette. ‘That younger waitress
has either been bitten or -* ’

‘I’ve never heard a mosquito here.’

‘Then she has an eruption of some sort. We must
arrange she does not wait on us.’

Presently the manager passed us bearing a plate of
food for the little pom. ‘Before our wine!’ remarked
Dolores.

The Baroness received the dog’s food importantly.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

The manager laid it respectfully at her feet and the
little dog sniffed fastidiously.

‘Dolly/ she said, ‘eat.’

‘Did she say my name?’ asked Dolores sharply.
‘Who?’

‘That old hag in the corner there.’

‘Ssh.’

‘She won’t understand English. And besides, don’t
you see, she has an ear trumpet ... I hope I shall never
grow old like that.’

Plainly the old lady knew how not to hear when it
suited her.

‘Her face is as white as a clown’s. It’s hardly
human,’ said Dolores. ‘And that nose peeping out.
Like - like a mongoose. Maitre d’h6tel, will you
never give us anything to drink? Why are there no
flowers on the table? But I love flowers. I need them.
Even if we make an extra payment. I love everything
elegant. It is in my nature. No. I don’t want them
stale from some other table. I had rather go without
. . . Steenie! I ask you. Did she mention my name?’

‘I think she called her dog Dobby or Dolly.’

Dolores made no reply. We were in the presence
of a most attractive omelet. I knew she was hesitating
between declaring she could not bring herself to touch
a single mouthful, and taking the larger half. She
took the larger half and I felt greatly relieved. When
the wine came she drank it without comment but
appreciatively.

But this was only a catspaw before a gale.

134

DOLORES AT TORQUJ^STOL

§3

I am fairly modern and liberal about eroticism, but
the behaviour of the Baroness’s Dolly really shocked
me. And Bayard’s was very little better. But it was, I
insist, that shameless little pom with her yaps of
admiration who began it. Directly she set eyes on him.

It was at dinner. All those unspeakable charabanc
people had gone long since. The lunch had blown over
and we had unpacked and Dolores and I had had a
nice t6te-a~t6te. She seemed more at peace with the
world. Our social life was running unencumbered..
There was space and leisure in the salle k manger,,
bows, greetings and conversation between table and
table, and only very subdued sounds of eating. The
English mother and son who say ‘Bon soir’ to every-
body and never anything more, were at their table,
and so were the large family from Paris with the
mother and father totally unused to guide a family
through a meal in the presence of spectators, who were
continually girding at their offspring and asking them
what people would think of them, remarking also for
the general benefit, ‘At home you do not do that. You
would never dream of doing so nasty a thing. You are
excited. You forget everything. The gentleman there
- yes, the nice English gentleman “ is shocked at you.’
There were also three bourgeois honeymoon couples,
one couple rather gross and the others young and shy.
The two English fishermen — or were they Irish? —

135

APROPOS OF DOLORES

had entered in a satisfied state from an excellent day’s
sport. There was also a lonely man with a vast smooth
belly of a face^ possibly a commercial traveller, in a
shiny grey suit.

We had got about halfway through the meal, and
Dolores was making a depreciatory inspection of the
company and finding it ‘banal’, just as I remembered
her doing years ago at Antibes, when Bayard, who had
been resting from the fatigues of the journey, was
brought in by Marie to assist at the meal.

Whether the pom was really under the urgency of
passion I doubt. I am inclined to think that the mis-
guided little beast was suddenly seized with a wild
desire for play and canine friendship, and that she
found some mysterious attractiveness, which was
possibly quite independent of sex appeal, in Bayard.
Her shamelessness may possibly have been the shame-
lessness of complete innocence. It is not for me to
judge. But it was impossible to misinterpret the
nature of his response to her advances. For a lady’s
pet there is something very coarse about Bayard.
And the surprise, horror and disgust of the Baroness
was equally unmistakable.

Indeed our first intimation of any incorrectitude
was a loud cry of ‘degoutant!’ from the old lady, and
we saw her struggle to her feet, seize her stick, and
administer a hearty thwack to our pet, before any
intervention was possible.

‘Come away from him, Dolly!’ she cried. ‘Come
away!’

136

DOLORES AT TORQU^lSTOL

Bayard yelped as the cane descended, but refused
to relinquish his delightful, his most enjoyable com-
panion. The stick was raised again.

‘Madame!’ screamed Dolores, standing up. ‘Will
you please to refrain from hitting my dog.’

‘Madame!’ returned the Baroness, flatly but loudly,
‘will you please take this insufferable little beast away.’

The maitre d’hotel and I intervened promptly,
and separated the dogs, leaving the two ladies face to
face. I tucked up Bayard, struggling violently, under
my arm. The pom, after a vain attempt to treat the
whole affair as a great lark, realized something of the
portentiousness of the situation and retired behind its
mistress.

Dolores was saying: ‘I should have thought,
Madame, that you would have realized the impro-
priety of bringing a chienne in that condition into the
presence of other dogs.’

The Baroness was replying: ‘My little dog is per-
fectly well behaved. It had no idea beyond innocent
play. I do not know what you mean by its condition.
I do not understand you. The suggestion is indelicate
to say the least of it. Come, Dolly! Did that nasty
dirty-minded little dog insult you!’

She resumed her seat with great dignity. Dolores
resumed hers with even greater dignity. I remained
holding Bayard. The head waiter hovered. Dolores
regarded me with anger and contempt, all tenderness
forgotten.

‘Can’t you put him down, Steenie, for his dinner?’

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘Hadn’t he better go upstairs to Marie?’

‘Is my dog to be driven away from me at the whim
of a total stranger?’

I lost my temper. ‘Damn the dogs/ said 1. I put
down Bayard as one who washed his hands of the
whole affair and almost immediately he reverted to his
supreme preoccupation. I did my best to go on lunch-
ing as though I was deaf, dumb and a bachelor in a
dogless, sexless world. Meanwhile a great altercation
arose about me. Marie, Madame Hunot, the maitre
d’hdtel, the spotted serving maid, the commercial
traveller with the vast face, made various interventions.
Happily the two principal ladies remained in their
places. But they expressed themselves with such
lucidity, length and vigour that for a time the actual
proceedings of Bayard and his little friend were prac-
tically disregarded. Because of her deafness the
Baroness did not so much reply to what Dolores said
as make a series of antagonistic statements. Antagonis-
tic and yet in substance closely similar, but delivered
in a deep penetrating voice that reproached Dolores
for screaming.

Both ladies found it necessary to assume an ex-
tremity of aristocratic poise, pride and authority.
They were, we were given to understand, ‘grandes
dames’ of a type rare since the revolutionary close of
the eighteenth century. But their desire for an icy
elevation was shot with a passionate impulse to sting
and burn. Each wanted to indicate with the utmost
acuteness her complete penetration of the unjustifiable

138

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

pretensions of the other. In each a fishwife struggled
with a queen. ‘Permit me to tell you, Madame/ was
really not a demand for permission. ‘If you will allow
me to remark, Madame,’ brooked no denial. There
were differences of style of course. The Baroness was
disposed to sail across the sky far above what people
nowadays are apt to call the ‘facts of life’, but Dolores
true to her habit of keeping her conversation on the
spicy side, unfolded a liberal-spirited, living and pene-
trating knowledge of the more passionate needs of
canine femininity. Much of this discourse flowed over
me. I did my best to keep my head down beneath the
level of parapet and parados. Then I began to take
notice again.

Dolores was talking in this style. ‘My little dog, I
would have you know, Madame, is a pedigree dog and
perfect in every particular. For stud purposes his
attentions are priceless. If I cared for him to occupy
his time in that fashion. Naturally your own little dog,
who is, I should think, partly a Pomeranian — ’

Scrutiny through the lorgnette.

The Baroness was saying: ‘She cannot contain her-
self, Madame. Her sensibilities are of the finest. When
she is locked in my room she shows her resentment in
a quite unmistakable manner. It’s not only the noise
she makes, Madame, though that is bad enough. She
insists on being with me. She is a creature of infinite
affection. A room wdthout me is — dehors. It is your
dog, Madame, that should be placed under restraint. I
have never seen so ill-bred a dog. Never! It is these

139

APROPOS OF DOLORES

spoilt and ill-trained dogs who make the possession of
a pet impossible. God knows what indulgence is shown
him. . . .’

Suddenly I came to a decision. This had gone on
long enough. I arose gesticulating commandingly
with my table napkin. I contrived to knock a glass off
the table and the smash stilled every other voice.

I struck an attitude like the portrait of an eigh-
teenth-century general.

^Listen/ I said in a voice of authority foreign to
my nature. ^All dogs must go away! Marie remove
Bayard. Never mind what he is doing. Remove him,
I say. Detach him and remove him. Instantly. And
you, Madame, if you will pardon my insistence, must
banish that dog of yours also. Madame Hunot, I
appeal to you, manifestly dogs must not be brought
into the salle a manger. In many hotels it is an
established regulation. You must make it an in-
variable rule, from now onward. I will not resume
my seat until both have been taken away and this
repast restored to tranquillity.’

Tt is the only solution,’ said the maitre d’hdtel
appealingly to the Baroness, ‘Monsieur is right,’ and I
perceived that a sort of cheering was going on among
the other pensionnaires. I heard one of the fishermen
saying something about shooting the bloody little
beasts. Madame Hunot gathered up the little pom and
Marie fought with Bayard and secured him. Both the
two ladies were conscious of having said good things
and were willing now to eat.

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DOLORES AT TORQU:^STOL

^So long as both animals go/ they said simultane-
ously, with an air of having discovered this satisfactory
solution themselves.

^Why do you not always assert yourself, Steenie?’
said Dolores as social order returned.

I perceived that in Dolores’ present phase I might
figure as the strong decisive man and anything in that
r61e would be acceptable.

A sort of truce of mutual disdain set in between the
two principal ladies and has lasted two whole days. In
spite of Dolores’ express prohibition I insist on bowing
with profound respect to the Baroness whenever I
encounter her. I will be damned if I am rude to old
women to please anyone. The Baroness responds with
regal dignity. After all Dolores is my misfortune, the
old lady’s bow intimates, I am not to blame. But to
Dolores it is as if I acknowledged the primacy of her
antagonist and v\ e have hau vehement recriminations
about it upstairs-

§4

For two or three days, as I have explained, Dolores
was in a tolerable state of mind. I was able and quite
willing to keep her in a tolerable state of mind. Then
she passed into her less amiable phase out of my con-
trol and her malignant side came uppermost. In these
interludes one is subjected to unexpected storms, often
of the most frightful description. There is almost

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

always a scene at table when she declares herself to be
suffocating with emotion and gets up and leaves the
room. This time she embarked upon a development
of our long-standing quarrel about Lattice of which I
will tell later, but also she devised a new and formid-
able aggravation of the row with the old bleached
Baroness.

When the phase of irritability is descending upon
Dolores, either I go to England or I do what I can to
relieve her tension by taking her about in a car or
distracting her by shows and entertainments of a
blameworthy sort. Then she is able to vent herself
upon scenery, animals, strangers, the dispensations of
nature, the arrangements of mankind, with a refresh-
ing disapproval, always employing that intolerable
French idiom, Te trouve - % which still jars upon my
English ear as the quintessence of vyisolicited ill-bred
judgment. She finds this ‘banaF and that ‘un peu
stupid’ and so on round the whole con;ipass of existence.
T cannot congratulate you, Steenie, on your choice of
an excursion,’ she will say. She feels ‘bound to say’
this or that for which I can see no necessity whatever.
Quite possibly it is an unsatisfactory universe in gross
and detail but I see no reason for insisting upon it. So
I do my best not to hear her verdicts, and when each
has been delivered we get on to the next kill.

We were surveying that teeming Calvary outside
the little chapel of St. flerbot and I was pointing out
one or two points that had struck me about the Holy
Family to Dolores’ evidently unheeding ears.

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DOLORES AT TORQU]^STOL

All day she had been ominously silent and moody.
She had let all sorts of things go by her on which she
might have poured contempt. Suddenly she spoke.
‘Fve got it/ she said.

‘Got what?'

‘That woman. She is a leper.'

‘Which woman? All the scriptural lepers I have
ever heard of, were men. Do you mean that one there
to the left? It’s simply that some vandal has broken
off her nose.’

‘And what is more, Monsieur Hunot is aware of it.’

Something like terror came upon me. ‘What are
you talking about?’ I asked.

‘We can’t stay in that hotel a moment longer unless
she leaves. It’s abominable. It’s disgusting. It’s
revolting.’

‘But my dear, what earthly reason - ?’

‘I felt it in my bones directly I saw that awful white
face. At any time we might get it - if only through
the dogs.’

I faced Dolores in a stale of desperate resolution.
‘Look here,’ said I, ‘you cannot go on with this.’

‘It’s something to go on with — without a moment’s
delay. ’

‘If you see fit without rhyme or reason to proclaim
leprosy at Torqudstol it isn’t simply that poor old
lady-’

‘Poor old lady! Yes, my dear lover.’

‘Who will be able to accuse you of libel and de-
famation. It will affect the Hunots. It will affect the

H3

APROPOS OF DOLORES

waiters. It will kill their season. It will affect the
reputation of the whole place. Every one of them will
have grounds for action against you — justifiable
grounds. There will be a hell of a fuss, my dear.
There will be no end to it. Never have you hit upon
a more poisonous phobia.^

‘As usual!’ cried Dolores. ‘As usual — in your
customary sweet and generous way you are against
me! You immediately take sides against me. My loyal
beloved husband!’

‘But what have you to go upon. The poor old
lady - ’

^Lady!

‘Hasn’t any single symptom you can fix upon. Not
one.’

‘I tell you that woman is a leper. I know it. And
there we are and there is everybody in that hotel ~ in
danger. You wdth your insouciance don’t care. You
would live in filth if it w^asn’t for me. The worms
would eat you. And simply to save yourself bother I
may end my days in some leper colony, my hands
worn to stumps, my nose dropping off. . . .’

‘But - ’

‘Don’t you see? Whether she’s a leper or not I ~ I
in my nervous condition — am in such a torment of
fear that quite possibly I shall become a leper whether
she is one or not.’

‘She’s no more a leper than I am.’

‘Then have her examined! At least that could be
done.’

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DOLORES AT TORQUl^STOL

*My God, Dolores/ I cried, ‘this is too much. I
will not have you start a thing of this sort.’

‘I didn’t start it. That woman started it. Is it so
extravagant an idea that she should be examined?’

‘It’s a most ingenious and intolerable insult. But
let that be. Don’t you realize it isn’t only that poor
old lady you attack? I say again, you are going to face
lawsuits from the entire Torqu^stol community. The
damages will be enormous.’

‘You’re as rich as Croesus. Everyone says so. Only
you grudge spending money - where either my health
or my honour is concerned.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘that won’t do. If you drag me into a
mess over this, every penny comes out of the provision
I have made for you. Do you grasp that?’

‘I will not eat my meals in the same room as a
leper.’

‘Then let us pack and go somewhere else and say
nothing about it.’

‘Give way tc that old - ’ She used a French
word I have never properly understood. I doubt if it
can be understood properly.

‘Give way to your fancies.’

‘You and your talk of social service! You and your
precious Way of the World series! A brave new world!
Here is a whole population threatened with a most
horrible disease and your remedy is to run away.
Exactly like you. You just play with the idea of mend-
ing the world. You don’t mean it.’

We got back into the car in silent fury and drove off.

K 145

APROPOS OF DOLORES

^Dolores/ I said presently^ ‘has it ever occurred to
you that you might go too far with me?’

‘Telling you the truth?’

‘You understand as well as I do.’

‘And this is the man I have held in my arms a
thousand times!’

‘Possibly more. But all the same you may go too
far.’

‘You are my husband.’

‘Husbands have left wdves before to-day.’

‘You threaten me. I would follow you to the end
of the earth. I would take such a revenge upon you.
You think I am powerless. Any other woman and it
is vitriol my dear. No jury w’^ould convict me when
they heard my story. It would be a tremendous trial.
My sketch of your character would be remembered.’

She seemed to find it an attractive prospect.

‘Never mind about that/ I said.' ‘Nobody is going
to be interested in your sketch of my character. It
will just be all about yourself. I am just a poor pub-
lisher nobody know^s. You’d be lost in my obscurity.
The point I want you to grasp is that this leprosy inven-
tion of yours will be going too far with me. Think
what these words mean, exactly, Dolores, going too far
with me,'

‘Fool I was, to expect a pretentious bookseller, a
mere tradesman in other people’s feelings, to be a
lover capable of ordinary chivalry,’ said Dolores and
I realized she was in retreat. She went on with a
survey of my unworthiness. The idea of giving a

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

witty but excoriating sketch of my character and
morals in a court of law, the court enthralled and all
normal procedure laid aside, had stimulated her
imagination and distracted her from the baroness.

The rest of the way we did not speak. She just sat
in a reverie with a faint smile on her face inventing
stinkers to say about me. Now and then she made the
ghost of a rhetorical gesture with her hand. I drove
the car with a grim and menacing air, inwardly well
content with her silence.

That was some days ago now. She is passing her
phase of maximum malignity. She is returning to
normality. The Scotch in her blood is ascendant. She
has taken what I said about endless litigation and
damages to heart and up to the present there is nothing
of primary importance to report on what I may per-
haps call the baroness front. Dolores has not made an
explicit charge of leprosy to anyone, even to Marie,
and I think she means to tone down her great idea to
^some skin disease — or why so much face powder?’

Even that, she is not making into a positive accusa-
tion. She is insinuating it. Every day she delays action
the situation improves and she can less admit an over-
powering horror. She is insinuating the idea of infection
by having tables moved and getting nearer the window
and by large and ostentatious purchases of antiseptics
at the local chemist. She speaks of the baroness
habitually as ‘that leprous visage’ or that ‘terrible
decayed face’, but this, so far, had been accepted as a
merely common abuse and not as a libellous charge.

147

APROPOS OF DOLORES

At any time of course some accident may explode the
situation, but it has none of the terrifying urgency it
had some days ago.

That has been major row number one. The most
pressing and immediate. If an explosion does come,
either we shall be obliged to leave this hotel or, what
is improbable, the baroness on her part may retreat.
My impression is that the old lady is getting quite as
much kick out of the squabble as Dolores, but so far
she has not appreciated the point about leprosy. Even
if Dolores does come out with that presently I doubt
if the results will be catastrophic. Both ladies will cer-
tainly threaten litigation of an embittered type. But
this will probably peter out in a diminuendo of threats
and insults as their imaginations tire. We shall return
to Paris 3 the baroness will go off to wherever she be-
longs and new and brighter quarrels will distract them
both. It will all blow over. It is a large but it is a
transitory disturbance. But our second row is of a
more chronic and fundamental character. We take
that about with us. I doubt if it will ever blow over.

§5

Our second major trouble turns on the existence of
my daughter Lettice. As I think I told some way back
I left Lettice with Alice and Hoopler after the divorce.
I thought that at the time this was the best arrange-
ment. But there seems to be mixed up with a strong
sense of obligation a curious philoprogenitive streak in

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DOLORES AT TORQUJ^STOL

my make-up. For some obscure reason, maybe be-
cause there is a sort of affectionateness in me that
cannot crystallize about Dolores, my mind has begun to
run on Lettice.

Let me try and set down the facts with as little
gloss upon them as possible. What is there in myself
that one could call my heart’s desire? My desire gives
itself an impersonal air. I want someone on whom I
can lavish myself, whom I can pet, cultivate, assist,
sustain. I say I want little or no return. That is what
I say. But as a matter of fact I do want a return —
rather I think in the spirit of those disingenuous old
flower-sellers who demand no price, but ‘leave it to
you. Sir’ - I want a very handsome return. I want to
love someone in an easy unstinted way, I like watching
people and forgetting myself in them, but also -
which is quite a different business — I want to get a
practically limitless amount of spontaneous affection
and caressing in return. And there is more to it than
that. My imagination craves association with some
kindred mind which will by a sort of necessity and
Avithout any doubts at all enter into my interpretation
of my life as a creative effort. I have doubts of myself,
but Beloved must not have them. I want somebody to
confirm my self-confidence, to keep me in heart with
myself. It is, to use a trite phrase, a sister soul I desire,
someone of whose close intellectual sympathies and
very delicate and incidental amorousness, the absolute
antithesis of Dolores’ alternations of storming lust,
limitless self-glorification and fantastic malice.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Among other characters that the extroverted
Stephen Wilbeck watches with detachment^ acute
interest and slightly qualified amusement, is one made
up of the less ingenuous aspects of the heart of this
same Stephen Wilbeck, a minor character in the
Stephen Wilbeck troupe - Stephen Wilbeck, that
complicated introvert, the tucked-in part of myself,
my ‘ego-centre’. There has never been a time when
this more intimate phase of me, at least, was completely
satisfied with Dolores. Even in the extremest gratifica-
tions of the earliest days there mingled a faint flavour
of shame and aversion and a sense that his desires were
being detached from their proper emotional sequences
and perverted and misused. My ego-centre does not
blame himself for the perversion and misuse 5 he
blames her.

I am doing my best to set the facts down here 5 not
to justify the central or any aspect of Stephen Wilbeck.
That is how it goes. Always in his mind, I suspect
though I do not surely know, there has been a sort of
phantom alternative passion, something better, some-
thing else, a passion altogether free from that faint
flavour of appreciative cruelty he feels when Dolores
is in his arms. That phantom, that antithesis of
Dolores, that unknown woman smoothly quiet in her
movements and low- voiced, that invisible third angle,
is a very real fact in the marital psychology of the
Wilbeck couple.

Long ago, Dolores, who can sometimes be ex-
tremely acute in her perceptions about this sort of

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DOLORES AT TORQUi^STOL

things said that when I made love to her, it was always
as if I was being unfaithful to someone else, my mind
running on someone else. There was no abandon to*
her. And going on from that in her own vividly
realistic way she has determined that there is someone
else. The Aldingham Square flat has settled that
beyond argument. Once her imagination has been
launched upon the realization of a jealousy against
some person or persons unknown, it has evoked a
vision of things going on beyond her knowledge that
torments her fantastically. It is a double-edged sword
which wounds her the more it discredits me.

Why, she asks, should a man go away from a
woman except to betray her? Since the only vivid
interest she will tolerate in me is the interest I take in
her person, she can concede me no capacity for any
other sort of interest. OflF I go then manifestly for
amorous variety and novelty. And the less evidence*
there is for any unfaithfulness the more intricate^
shameful and experienced must my deceptions be..
The stiller the surface the deeper the sin. So she
presents my dwindling interludes in France with her
as mere resting phases in a terrific career. I suppose
most men woidd prefer to be denounced as combina-
tions of Casanova and Hercules rather than as un-
qualified Josephs 5 nevertheless it is a distinct embarrass--
ment for a mild-mannered grey-clad Englishman to be
cast for the r61e of Priapus exposed.

‘My dear, he has been to bed with every woman
in London!’ I caught that magnificent sentence the

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Other day as I came into the salon. Her interlocutor
looked round with eyes bright with expectation - to
see me!

When Dolores imagines the work of Bradfield,
Clews and Wilbeck gets done, I do not know.

In her increasingly strenuous research for the
Unknown Beloved (or more probable Beloveds) she is
becoming more and more desperately unscrupulous.
She scrutinizes my letters; one or two addressed in a
feminine hand she has opened so to speak by mistake,
and a week or so before we came hither from Paris, I
found one envelope still wet and warm from the
steaming. We had a scene when she discovered the
signature of my new personal secretary at Durthing,
Camellia Bronte in a fine round feminine hand at the
end of a typewritten report. ‘That’s no name for a
decent woman,’ she said. ‘More like a chorus girl - or
a movie star. Have you begun to take her out to lunch
yet? That’s how the seductive Employer begins, isn’t
it?’

The idea of taking anyone out to lunch in Durthing
garden suburb was bright enough in itself, but that
the doomed object of my insatiable passions should be
dear old Camellia, whom I have inherited, so to speak,
from the late Lewis Checkshalton, and what a training
he gave her! with her glasses, her stoop and her in-
veterate sniff, made me chuckle. ‘It’s going well; is
it?’ said Dolores, interpreting my amusement as the
gross self-complacency of a rake, and when Ridgeway,
my leading publicity man, came over to discuss a littl e

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

campaign of ours and lunched with us one day, she
contrived to get him aside for ten minutes’ earnest
conversation. Afterwards I went with Ridgeway to
look over the new Paris offices.

Ridgeway has little to do with my private life, but
he is a simple upright good man, he had been deeply
moved, and something weighed upon his mind. We
walked along in an unusual silence, for he is by nature
a babbling creature. ‘That woman adores you,’ he
blurted out at last.

‘She told you so?’

‘Er - yes.’

‘It’s her phrase. And then?’

‘She’s worried about you. She wants to take care
of you more. She’s worried about what you do in
England.

‘What do I do in England?’

‘She’s worried,’

^Then when you went to India and China - ’

‘Never mind India and China. What is the trouble
in England?’

‘These dactylos. I hate to say it. These little
dactylos.’

‘Ridgeway, do you by any chance know what a
dactylo is?’

‘They worry her.’

‘She didn’t say?’

‘No.’

‘Some special sort of vice perhaps?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t really know. I know none

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

of that sort of French. I know it’s a suggestive lan-
guage. But she’s terribly worried about you. Not
jealous you know, but worried. On your account.
And it’s dactylos. I am sure I got the word right.’

‘You haven’t heard anything about this ~ these
dactylos - on the English side?’

‘Nothing’s come out over there. Yet, But she’s
worried.’

‘She asked you to tell her anything you know about
me and this sort of thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you did?’

‘I reassured her. I know nothing.’

‘And you don’t even know what a dactylo is?’

‘It’s a sort of thing outside my curiosity.’

‘A dactylo, Ridgeway, is the common French way
of saying typist.’

‘There’s a lot of this double-entente in French, I
know.’

^Oh! stop being a fool, Ridgeway. My wife is
insanely jealous and she has learnt from American
films and short-stories that American employers always
have affairs with their typists. And what’s the dif-
ference between an Englishman and an American in
these matters? She didn’t by any chance name the
particular little - dactylo in the case?’

‘No.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘You mean there really is one?’ His expression
was rich with reproach.

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DOLORES AT TORQU:^STOL

‘Yes/ I said contritely. And finding the note of
confession irresistible I held it. ‘My wife/ I said,
‘thinks I receive too many letters signed Camellia
Bronte.’

‘What!’ said Ridgeway. ‘Our Miss Bronte. NoP

‘She hasn’t seen her/ I said.

‘Gosh!’

‘Gosh covers the situation.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Can’t believe what?’

‘Can’t believe it of Miss Bronte.’

‘But what can’t you believe?’

Ridgeway began to readjust his mind. ‘You don’t
mean to say that perhaps Mrs. Wilbeck - I beg her
pardon, Madame Wilbeck, has made some mistake?
You see, she seemed to say she sort of had it from you.
That you practically admitted — . Boasted she said.’

‘What?’

‘Whatever it is.’

‘Ridgeway, did your nurse drop you on your head
when you were a baby? Or were you born like this?
Did anything frighten your mother?’

He looked at me, his mind still going through
elaborate phases of readjustment. ‘Well, I don’t
understand this sort of thing,’ he pleaded. ‘It isn’t the
sort of thing that’s in my line.’

‘Evidently. I don’t complain. Your essential ~
integrity of mind makes you one of the best publicity
men in London. You think like so many people. But
all the same before we drop this subject altogether I

155

APROPOS OF DOLORES

wish you would promise to do one little thing for me.
At the last summer outing of the clerical staff, if you
remember, there was a group photograph.’

Ridgeway nodded.

‘Will you get a copy of it? Will you put an ink line
round Miss Bronte. Will you send it to my wife with
a note over your signature, sa3dng ‘ ‘This is Miss Camellia
Bronte,” the dactylo in question? I am sure Dolores
will like to see the object of her husband’s - what shall
we call it? — dactylomania. Dactylomania. We ought
to tell Havelock Ellis about it. You will do that?
Right O. And here we are at the new Paris office.
Ground floor and a vitrine. What do you think of the
window display? ... It if attracts you it ought to
attract most people.’

§6

This was my first plain intimation that my wife’s
steadily developing jealousy had come to the pitch of
secret inquiries about my behaviour in England and of
private denunciations. I realized only gradually that
she was not only questioning every friend of mine she
could get at, but also she was collecting and distributing
gossip about me from anyone she met who knew or
pretended to know about me.

Her range of information was wide. She had a
varied circle of her own, remnants of the Monegasque
and Egyptian days, later acquistions in Paris, milliners,

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

beauty specialists, decorators, odd semi-resident Ameri-
cans, casual Russians. Mostly they were women of her
own age, tremendous women of the world, all scented,
all painted, all obscurely of the great world, dressed
with a chic that hurt, possessing highly individualized
styles, talking importantly or aggressively, whispering
scandalously or being silent (yet darkly enigmatical and
provocative) from corners of the room. Oh, brilliant
women they were! Mostly they bragged to one another
of their lovers, who seemed as a class reluctant to
appear. But now and then someone freshly caught
and still genuinely enamoured, would be handed
round for examination, ‘Mais il est charmant.’ Other-
wise there were few men mostly from the fringes of the
theatre and journalism. It was all rather like a slightly
tarnished realization of that smart Utopia in which
well-made French comedies occur. With fewer men
and still fewer titles.

There was much coming and going during my
absences in England, teas and cocktail parties, lunches,
receptions, premiferes, costume shows, scuttlings hither
and thither, into which I did not think it fair to inquire
too closely. Maybe I was treated as most husbands of
smart women are, but I doubt it. I think she would
have had to tell me about it. Dolores is a devil, but I
should say she is probably much less secretive than
most women. She has a sort of refractile honesty. It
shows everything distorted and askew but it shows
what is there. I think she has kept her love-hate
pretty steadily focused on me — and that the only use

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

she would have for another lover would be to throw
him at me. Which, she realizes, in view of Alice’s
experience, would be risky.

But of course no man is ever sure. She has a
wonderful French word ‘passades’. She may have
passades. Possibly with rather scared youngish men.
. . . But it is better not to imagine such possibilities.

In this circle of her friends I was one of the out-
standing lovers, so to speak, because I was lover-
husband, a rare combination, rather exceptional and
enigmatic. I was reputed to be intensely jealous,
capable of great violence and cruelty, and when pre-
sently it became manifest that she was altering her
tone, becoming really uneasy about me, almost every-
one in this circle of hers was at once ready to supply
at second or third hand or out of pure spiteful
invention, suggestions and fuel for her suspicions.
Her excitability makes her very transparent and I
suppose her mortified anxiety amused them. She did
not like to hear of things of which she was unaware
and so she did her best to anticipate her friends’
revelations. ‘My dear, the things I could tell you!’
And then — on the spur of the moment - she had, if
not to tell, at least to make substantial intimations.

Thus insensibly and quite unaware I lost my irre-
proachable character and changed from the Loving
Physically Satisfactory but alas! Preoccupied Petruchio
to a Monster - not only in Dolores’ accounts of me but
also in her own mind.

So far as I can trace the rise, expansion and

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DOLORES AT TORQUJ^STOL

intensification of this jealousy of hers, it was hardly
sexual at all in its beginnings. It was simply the
natural antagonism of a feminine egotism in conflict
with a man’s increasing disposition to go his own way
and think of things outside her personality and range.
What is the good of boasting of a lover who does not
incessantly dance attention and who cannot be kept
waiting? At first I think she invented this idea of ‘un-
faithfulness’ in England to justify her irrepressible
tirades against my increasing absences. ‘What does he
do there?’ she asked. But the next thing to that was
to suspect, and from that to believe in a complexity,
and strangeness in my conduct was a step for her.
And from that to accusations of strange manias and
perversions.

For a time she toyed with the pleasing fancy that
I took the unusual course of going about the world to
indulge for a change in homo-sexuality and then she
was seized by a more brilliant idea. Her attention
turned more and more definitely on my daughter
Lettice and my increasing interest in her as suitable
material for sinister suggestions.

Now, as I have said, I am becoming very interested
in Lettice and increasingly anxious to see her and
have her with me. It is quite recently that this began
and I cannot trace what set it going. But I think my
attention was first turned to Lettice by hearing that
George Hoopler was in a shipping office in Southampton
and not doing particularly well. He had long since
abandoned his literary pretensions and his projected

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

novel had either never been finished or never pub-
lished or it had been published so obscurely and un-
successfully that I have never heard of it. Lettice it
seemed had been sent to a not very well chosen school,
she had displayed no particular gifts and she was now
preparing for an undefined business career in a local
commercial college. Hoopler, I felt sure, had been
scrupulously honest about her allowance but not very
sedulous or clever about it, and he was making a very
ordinary middle class girl of her. I thought I had better
see how things were going. Partly my vanity was
wounded that my only offspring should not be promis-
ing brilliantly, but also I think I felt a genuine
solicitude for the young woman’s prospects. Perhaps
I had handed her over all too unreservedly to her
foster father. So I astounded Alice by sending her a
long and friendly letter, saying how frequently I
thought of her and her happiness, asking how she and
Hoopler were getting on and inquiring about Lettice.
Was there anything I could do for the girl? For myself,
I said, I was more and more \vrapped up in my publish-
ing enterprises and the years I found slipped by very
quickly.

This led to a meeting. I invented some business to
take me to Southampton and I had tea in the Hoopler
mdnage. It was, I thought, a rather dull menage,
though evidently a brave face had been put upon it for
my reception. The little sitting-room was in a
manifestly tidied-up state and what is called an ample
tea was spread upon the circular table. A bow window

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DOLORES AT TORQU^SSTOL

looked out very pleasantly over the Itchen and in
harmony with the view there was a nef on the upright
piano, various ships in bottles and tinted engravings
of ships. There was a reasonable extent of bookshelves
and a number of magazines and weeklies on a side
table. I had been admitted by a little maid-servant,
and now an Alice entered the room, broader and
stouter than I remembered her, but not too rouged
and with her brown eyes as alert as ever. A pretty
woman still, who had not done with life. At the sight
of her I remembered things I had forgotten 5 her
finely pencilled eyebrows and the pleasant twist of her
hair over her pretty ears. She decided to kiss me and I
accepted her reminiscent intimation at once and kissed
her with a certain warmth and a touch of regret. And
I felt it too for the moment. In fact we did all that very
well. ‘You’ve grown broader,’ she said.

‘You’re just the same Alice as ever.’

‘Heigh-ho,’ said she, and then, recoiling hastily at
the sound of feet in the passage: ‘We’ve told her you’re
her godfather. Understand? Godfather

Two Hoopler children came in, a boy in spectacles
and a fattish girl of thirteen, and after a minute or so my
sixteen-year-old Lattice. I was happy to note that she
was much better-looking than they were. I suppose
any man in my situation would feel that way, and I
did not reflect for a moment that thirteen is for girls
and boys the unkind age when growth grows crazy,
and that unless a girl is graceful at sixteen then surely
grace is denied her. But Lettice was budding very

L 161

APROPOS OF DOLORES

prettily indeed, burgeoning nicely into adolescence^
she was going to be as brightly winning as her mother
had been when first we fell in love. My heart warmed
to her. Her face was fairly intelligent but reserved and
un awakened. She said little, but she had nice hands
and moved them pleasantly as she played her helpful
part at the tea table, cutting things, passing things.
And after all why should a girl who looks delightful
veil herself in premature talk?

So far as I can remember we conversed about
Southampton and liners and travel, until Hoopler
came in.

He was much more substantial than in the days
of our romantic triangle and he bore himself with
more assurance, he stooped less and projected more,
and the convexity of his spectacles had increased. I
realized almost as soon as he began talking that he was
one of those mentally active, dull people who cast a
shadow much larger than themselves. I felt he must
have a very deadening influence upon his family. I
remembered him as silent and inexpressive but that
must have been because he was then in a state of
profound emotional tension. Now he had something
to say to everybody and always what he said led no-
where and expressed nothing. He greeted me with
grave friendliness. ‘A poor house but mine own,’ he
said. ‘That out there, that water, is the Itchen, but
even up here we feel the Call of the Sea. Strange how
it takes hold of one! The Island Blood. I come from
Nuneaton but that doesn’t seem to matter. You see

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

I've begun to collect these ships in bottles. Prisoners
and Seamen. In spite of myself.'

How was one to reply to that? I had a wild impulse
to respond, ‘My Aunt was a Pirate,' but I restrained
myself, because I felt Alice might perceive I was
pulling his leg.

He took up his tea cup and beamed across the table.
‘And how is our Lettice to-day? More Salad than ever
in that green dress.'

I was still rather at a loss though I felt I ought to
do something. ‘The son,' he said, ‘is all for the air,
aviator or nothing, though the Tang of the Salt Sea
Spray is good enough for me.'

‘Heart's Desire,' I tried.

‘Perfectly,' he answered. ‘Ozone.'

‘And seaweed.' I felt I was getting on nicely.

‘Alice Seconda,' he broke away, ‘is all for the air
in a different sense. Music. Hm?'

I struck out rather wildly with, ‘Grateful and Com-
forting. Therefore play on.'

I had terrible qualms about my staying power at
this sort of talk. ‘Does it run to another cup, Mother?'
I felt let me off.

He drank his second cup appreciatively and in the
interval Alice remarked that someone must cut the
cake. ‘It’s always so difficult, I think, to start a cake,'
she remarked to me as one housewife to another.
‘Then it's easy enough.’

‘Break the icing,' said Hoopler but proceeded to no
further brilliance for a space.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

So far the other members of the family had said
nothing. Now in the pause the boy ventured to speak.
‘My model flew - oh - a hundred yards to-day. ’

‘He means his model aeroplane/ Alice explained.
‘He spends all his time and money making them.’

‘Icarus/ said Hoopler and then with a fatuous
smile: ‘And I am his Dad — alas!’

I took that awful pun with a frozen calm.

‘Orcus in saluto/ said I gravely and shut him up
completely with these simple words.

That was a great inspiration. It sounded like Latin ^
it sounded like a quotation j it sounded like something
a cultivated George Hoopler ought to know. He
flushed slightly and an expression of baffled and un-
certain scholarship spread over his face. He looked up
at the ceiling trying to remember^ trying to construe.
Then his spectacle-magnified eyes sought mine in
scrutiny, in vague suspicion. Was I ignorant? Had I
misquoted? Or was I in some way reflecting upon him?
But I was careful not to meet his gaze. I had been
watching Lettice’s pretty but subdued-looking face
throughout these exchanges and I was forming a firm
resolution to get her mind out of this singularly
flattening atmosphere before it was too late. We might
have been saying anything so far as she was concerned.
She had acquired a habit of not listening already.

What are the rights of an alleged godfather? I
asked myself. He has no rights but he has considerable
facilities of suggestion and persuasion, and abruptly I
asked Lettice when she was to go to college, as if it was a

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DOLORES AT TORQUl^STOL

matter of course that she should go to college, and I
began to extol the charms of undergraduate life at
Bedford or Holloway College. Private theatricals.
Painting if you like. Charming girls to make friends
with. Good talk. Games. Rowing. Dancing,
said Alice.

^Why not?’ said I.

Hoopler caught up my idea very quickly. ^ Could
we have a sweeter girl graduate?’ he said with elaborate
generosity.

‘But the expense!’ said Alice.

‘That need not overwhelm you,’ I said casually,
and turning to the boy I asked how many planes he
had in commission.

It was evident that young Hoopler considered me
for a grown-up rather intelligent about planes.

I let the idea of the college soak in for a time and
returned to it when we three grown-ups were alone
together. ‘You’ve done so much for her. Frankly I’d
like to do more for her.’

They would not stand in the way. And Lattice
under the pretext of showing me the nice way back to
the station had a time with me alone. I liked having
this pretty slip of life which was blood of my blood and
bone of my bone walking along beside me. It was my
first taste of parental feeling. It felt better than any-
thing I had anticipated. ‘You’re magic,’ she said, ‘I
did not even know I had a godfather. And you come
suddenly out of the sky like this and tell me of colleges
and going abroad and - everything. Are you real?’

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

. ‘Touch me/ and she stopped short and looked up
at me with her head on one side, very much as her
mother used to do, provocatively, and hesitated. So I
took her by the shoulders and kissed her. We kissed
each other. ‘You’re a dear^^ she said, and we went on
for some paces with nothing further to say.

There certainly was something very intelligent
about her.

‘You’ll have to learn to speak good French,’ I said,
breaking the tension. ‘I live a lot in France - when I
am not working like a galley slave. Which is one
reason why I have seen so little of you hitherto.’

On my way to London I found myself in a very
pleasant sentimental reverie about this interesting
addition to my world. I had, I decided, thought of her
just in time. A most happy thought. She wasn’t too
late for education. I could do great things for her still.
I would send her to college, see that she had some
pretty clothes, take her out to restaurants and theatres
when I came to London, confide her socially to one or
two seemly woman friends I had made mostly in the
course of my business, take her abroad. . .

She must learn some real French abroad.

I saw myself going about with her. At last I could
have the pleasure of a feminine companionship other
than Dolores’, and without offence.

In spite of a hundred experiences of the smoulder-
ing malice in Dolores’ nature, I wrote to her about
Lettice. I had to write my usual daily letter and I
overflowed into this topic that filled my mind so agree-

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DOLORES AT TORQU:^STOL

ably. Dolores replied at length. ‘And so now, when I
have grown accustomed to the tragedy of my barren
life, I am to have that other woman’s daughter thrust
into my face,’ she began, and went on to denunciations
of my brutality, my intolerable betise. ‘And while you
are supposed to be away from me on that marvellous
business of yours, you are prancing about after that
silly drab you had to divorce and her brat - which
may or may not be yours for all you know!’ And so on.

‘Damn!’ I said and tore the letter and pitched it
into the waste-paper basket and then recovered it and
put it together again to afflict myself with one or two
of the choicer bits again. ‘Why did I ever tell her?’

This time Dolores had succeeded in getting well
under my skin, and I walked up and down my office
in Carrington Square, when I ought to have been
attending to my normal correspondence, raging at this
wanton obstruction of my wishes. ‘If ever there was
a born murderee,’ I said, ‘Dolores is the woman.’

That was three years ago and since then Lettice
has been an intensifying exasperation between us. It
is one of the few things I cannot tui'n into laughter.
These are crucial years in a girl’s life. I am convinced
she has considerable undeveloped capacity, but she
strikes me as being unenterprising and rather self-
satisfied, and unless she gets a good social environment
soon and the stimulus of intelligent associates, she
will settle down for life to a humdrum, undervitalized
way of living. But I find myself altogether baffled in
my efforts to save her. Just sending her to Permain

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

College is not enough, because as the Head made very
clear to me, girls gravitate into sets and groups accord-
ing to the quality of their home lives and their tem-
peramental dispositions. ‘She doesn’t go out to people
and make friends with them,’ said the Head.

Unfortunately I have no circle for her. In London
my life centres upon the Parnassian Club, I do not as
Dolores would say ‘entertain’. Few people come to my
flat, I may have a bachelor dinner or an author or so to
tea 5 and the problem of this girl makes me realize the
restless Parisian snobbishness and isolation of my
alleged home. The best imitation of a cultivated back-
ground I can give her is to take her about myself and
travel with her, and, since I have no available sisters or
aunts or cousins, I shall have to find someone of mani-
fest respectability with a daughter perhaps, to take
charge of her in London. I should have taken her
abroad before but for the certainty of a violent ex-
plosion on the part of Dolores.

Which brings me to a question, towards which I
have been drifting for some time, whether I have not
come to a point when a definite break with Dolores
ought to occur -if only for my self-respect. She will
fight and cling like a wild cat and scream worse, and
I guess I shall have to pay heavily enough, but when
I have got out of it and bathed my scratches, the
freedom, the quiet!

Yet even that release is not certain. The marriage
bond is a peculiar one and it is quite possible she will
not let me go. Marriage gives an overwhelming

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DOLORES AT TORQU:^STOL

advantage to the ill-disposed partner. No one realizes
that better than Dolores. There has to be an element
of collusive acquiescence in every English divorce. She
will never again get anyone so close to her as I have
been and am, and probably she knows that as well as
I do. She would have to jab at comparative strangers
and subsist on minor animosities. It is absurd to call
her relationship to me love, but nevertheless I give
her prestige; I am the dominating substantial fact, I
am her main interest, I am the most powerful stimu-
lant in her life.

§7

{Torquestol^ August 2^th^ 1934)

It was my cousin John who revealed to me just
how far her wanton antagonism to Lettice had taken
Dolores. John becomes more and more a natural born
sympathetic go-between. Virginia has left him - for
another man with whom she wants to settle down -
but John just sympathizes with her, tries meticulously
to find out whether she is really happy or not, refuses
to be reassured about ^that fellow’ and will not give her
a divorce. ‘Some day, very likely she will need to
come back to me,’ he says, and will not budge from
that.

I see very little of him, but from quite early days
he seems to have sustained a deep understanding with
Dolores. He prides himself on understanding people,

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

and understanding Dolores I think is one of his
proudest feats. It must be a variegated understanding.
He comes to Paris in pursuit of his artistic interests and
usually when I am away, and then he and Dolores
lunch or dine together and have good long earnest
talks about my treatment of her. I saw him just before
I came over to France this last time. His club, the
Palette, is doing its redecoration and its members are
visiting the Parnassian, of which I am a member. He
came into the dining-room when I was lunching. He
hesitated for a moment and then came across the room
to me, ‘May I sit with you?’ he asked. There was
something faintly portentous in his manner.

T’m fortunate,’ I said. T’m just beginning.’

He gave his order and for some moments neither
of us said anything. He was too full of his hidden
thoughts and feelings to say anything to me and I
never know what to say to him. I think he must realize
the sort of quite unjustifiable contemptuous aversion I
feel for him, but I am not sure. Usually I am able to
treat him lightly and get a sort of sour fun out of -
how can I say it? - his emotional contralto, but this
time there was a marked absence of humour on my
side, I know not why, from the start.

T see Dolores at times, Stephen,’ he began sud-
denly.

T know you do.’

‘She isn’t well. She says she suffers from insomnia.’

‘Don’t I know it!’

‘She isn’t looking well.’

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

‘I know. The blade - all too keen - that chafes
its sheath.’

‘She looks haggard.’

I misheard him deliberately. ‘I wouldn’t call her
a hag. No. She overpaints of coursOj she is getting
middle-aged and that seems to flurry her, she overdoes
everything nowadays. She gets worse, John. Worse
and worse. But not a hag.’

T didn’t call her a hag,’ said John gently. T said
she looked worn and haggard.’

‘There is nothing that I know of to make her worn
and haggard - except that having nothing to make her
worn and haggard, probably distresses her and keeps
her awake at nights and wears her out.’

‘I don’t know,’ said my cousin John. ‘I don’t know.’

I thought matters might very well rest at that and
I asked a few friendly questions about his painting.
When was he going to have another show and did he
like these conversation pieces that were getting so
fashionable again? He answered me in a rather dis-
traught fashion and came back to the subject of
Dolores. ‘You know,’ he said and paused. ‘I think
Dolores is very unhappy.’

‘Any suggestions?’ I asked in the subsequent
interval.

‘That woman adores you,’ he said. ‘From the first
she did. In those dear old days at the Hotel Pension
Malta, I saw it. At the time it seemed something
beautiful — a life’s passion. She is not a woman who
loves lightly.’

171

APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘Good Lord no,’ I said. ‘Whom she loveth, she
chasteneth.’

‘It’s all - her intensity of feeling,’ he said. ‘Never
did a woman make the gift of a heart so completely.
What comes easily I suppose is never valued. But it is
true, Stephen, that you are making her terribly un-
happy. I doubt if you realize that. This last affair -’

‘What last affair — ’

He shrugged his shoulders. ^Surely you understand! ’

‘Last affair or any affairs. What are my affairs —
supposing I have affairs - what have they to do with
you, John?’

He pulled a face. ‘After all I am your nearest
relative. I promised to speak to you.’

‘Promised Dolores?’

‘Yes.’

‘And now, if you will stop beating about the bush,
what is it all about?’

‘This child.’

^What child?’

‘Your own flesh and blood, Stephen!’

He flushed. His eyes were full of indignant accusa-
tion. He was panting a little.

‘John,’ I said very gently. ‘Are you saying some-
thing - are you insinuating something — just a bit
horrible - about me and my daughter?’

He nodded.

^What?'

There are times when the Old Adam of one’s com-
position urges one to untimely hitting. But the New

17a

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

Adam of civilization was sufficiently strong in me to
save me from a scandalous and ambiguous scuffle with
John in the dining-room of the Parnassian.

‘I could not believe it, Stephen/ he said, red,
breathless but uncowed, ‘until — until Dolores gave
me - well — practically chapter and verse.’

^What do you mean?’

He swallowed.

Well?’

^Things you have said to her. Your tone in speak-
ing of the girl. Dolores has an insight . . .’

‘I’m not going to be separated from my own
daughter because Dolores has a nasty imagination.’

^But consider the look of the thing.’

‘Do you believe, John - ?’

‘I neither believe nor disbelieve. Leave me out of
it. Please, please. I judge no one. What matters to
me is that Dolores sees in your daughter — it is really
terrible, Stephen — her rival.’

"And you — ?’

‘Never mind about me. I’ve not even seen the
young lady.’

‘Nor has Dolores.’

‘She sees your infatuation.’

For a moment or so I surveyed the complicated
excitement of my cousin’s face. ‘John,’ I said abruptly.
^Let’s come down to reality. Why don’t you clean your
own doorstep instead of helping make a mess on mine?
Why don’t you give that wretched Virginia of yours a
divorce?’

175

APROPOS OF DOLORES

A pained expression came over John’s face. ‘If you
choose to take refuge in an unjustifiable tu-quoque/
he said, and left the sentence uncompleted.

‘It isn’t even a tu-quoque,’ he murmured, bending
low over his apple pie.

‘I admit I can give you back nothing as nasty as
you have given me,’ I said.

He looked up. His face was the face of a martyr.
A martyr who has done his duty and who is finishing
up his apple pie as though it was baked hairshirt and
thorns. He really seemed in difficulties with his masti-
cation. We stared blankly at each other. I remember
observing that his large grey eyes had if anything got
larger and the lower lids lower. He has bags under
them and his mouth and his neck sag. He wdll make
an awfully loose-faced old man, will John.

^What have I done^^ I said, ‘to have a wife who is a
dangerous lunatic and a cousin who is a dangerous
mutt? So this is the new situation. Well ... I don’t
know what to say, John. I don’t know what to do. I
remain — flabbergasted.’

It was a poor word, it is a poor word at the best of
times, but nothing else came into my astounded mind.
So I repeated it^ ‘flabbergasted’.

‘I’ve said all I have to say,’ said John. ‘I wish to
God, Stephen, it hadn’t been necessary. . . .’

For the nonce I too had nothing to say.

We were too nicely brought up to fling out of the
room. We finished our lunch in speechless, in breath-
less, dignity.

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

‘No cheese/ said I to the waiter. ‘No coffee.’

‘No cheese, thank you,’ said John. ‘Coffee upstairs.’

§8

I went back from the club to my flat boiling with
indignation. This was too much. This time Dolores
had got me infuriated as I had not been infuriated by
her for years. She had discovered something at last
that I could not take lightly. She had got through my
defensive derision of myself and my world, to the
quick.

I felt like beating up that idiot John and then going
over to Paris and murdering Dolores, but plainly my
feelings were no guide whatever to what I had to do.
And moreover I realized that Dolores would rather
like me to murder her, provided the thing was done
in a properly dramatic and public manner. At least
she would like the idea of it until I actually began.

Exaggerated ideas of the mischief afoot chased
each other through my mind. If she was putting it
about that I was possessed by an incestuous passion for
Lettice, then plainly to discontinue seeing and helping
the girl would be halfway to an admission of my guilt.
I was in a cleft stick. The only thing I could think of
was to rage across the channel and insist upon her
receiving Lettice in Paris, going about with her and
myself and wiping out this abominable slur upon both
of us. Yet even then, she was likely to be the least

175

APROPOS OF DOLORES

desirable of companions to my shy and rather backward
Lattice.

How far the slur had gone I did not know. It
might have been invented as a special confidence to
stir up John or might have been retailed as the last
feat of her monster to all the Paris circle. At the time
I was so much disturbed, so shocked into naivety, that I
did not reflect that whatever story she told and however
much it might be repeated, no one would really and
completely believe this thing of me. Though up to a
certain extent anyone will believe almost anything
discreditable about you or me or anyone. It is a
strange thing in the human make-up, the readiness to
believe that the worst has still to be told about us. But
they will believe only to the extent of an agreeable
imaginative excitement. Their pleasure begins and
ends at the pointing finger. But I do not want fingers
pointed at Lettice.

It was only after a couple of unusually bad and
entirely humourless nights that matters ameliorated
and took on this juster perspective.

§9

{Torquestoly August 1954)

By the time I returned to Dolores in Paris I was
more or less my normal self again, resolved after my
usual fashion to humour her as much as possible and

176

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

by some feat of evocation get her into a fit of generosity
and persuade her to entertain Lettice in Paris for just
as brief a period as may be necessary to dispel that
nasty imputation. I am always forgetting my wife’s
inveteracy. To the end of our days, I, who am always
easing off from my first crude, over-emphatic state-
ments, will fail to comprehend the hard persistence of
her malignity. She sticks to everything she can lay
hands upon. She even sticks to every lie she tells. My
disposition for give and take she interprets as weakness
and she grabs the new advantage and yields nothing.
When Dolores realized what I was getting at, it pre-
sented itself to her simply as a new means of vexatious
assertion against me.

‘This time,’ said I, ‘I will not let you thwart me.’

How many times have I not said that ‘This time’!
And weakened.

‘I will not be separated from my own daughter by
you or anyone,’ I blustered.

‘As bad as that it is! As bad as that! Infatuation!’

‘I will stop your allowance.’

‘I will sue you for maintenance.’

T will halve your allowance.’

‘I will bring divorce proceedings. Yes, Steenie.
And very silly you will look among your dowdy English
lady-friends, when I show you up. Your own daughter,
your own, so far as you can tell, that is, as co-respon-
dent! That will set all London talking if anything can.
And she won’t be the only co-respondent. No! All
your friends are not as discreet as you are. I know

M 177

APROPOS OF DOLORES

things. And that secret flat of yours! Well, you meant
it to be secret. . . . Have you never heard of private
inquiry agents? I’ll bring in that Camellia Bronte of
yours. And others. That will put a pretty light on
your JVay of the World series and your New Humanity
and all that. That will make tongues wag. So you’d
better drop it, Steenie dear, before you push me too far.
You’d better drop it. I won’t have that nasty little
Miss here pushing me out of my own apartment.
Make a dactylo of her. That’s all she’s fit for. Put
her with a dressmaker, if there are such things as
dressmakers in England, and let her learn to work. . . .’

And so on.

And then within an hour or so I would be subjected
to an amorous attack. T love you. See how I love you.
Why do you misunderstand me so? Why do you do
everything you can to distress me? I would do anything
for you - anything.''

‘Except . . .’

‘Don’t come back to that: don’t distress me again.
What woman would endure that? How fantastic you
are . How obdurate 1 ’

§ lo

Long before this trouble about Lettice began we
had begun a standing dispute about two servants of
ours, the Benniels, Marguerite who was our cook and
Francois who was our chauffeur, whom for no reason

178

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

I can fathom, she has set herself to ruin. The baffled
feeling I haye now about Lettice is just the same
baffled feeling that I have had about these Benniels,
but far more intimate, vivid and shameful. I was
nominally their master and they were dismissed out-
rageously from my employment. I have helped them
furtively, but I cannot induce Dolores to relent to-
wards them. They occupy now an established position
in her system of hates.

Yet they were her discovery. We came upon them
by chance when we were motoring among the castles
of the Loire. That was six or seven years ago. Dolores
had suffered from a decaying pre-molar and had be-
come very neurasthenic, the dentist it seemed com-
mitted remarkable villainies^ Heaven alone knows
exactly what 3 and I had come over to Paris to take her
for a tour and generally assuage her. She had con-
ceived a great dislike to tourists and tourist hotels ~
but then all over the world tourists detest and disavow
and avoid tourists — and had set herself to discover in
small unpretending inns, the slowly vanishing domestic
cuisine fran§aise. Generally we found it far gone in
decay and associated with primitive sanitary conditions
and a great wealth of flies. But the Benniels we found
were different. Their little inn was clean in all its
arrangements, our lunch had an undefinable distinc-
tion - and they undercharged. They undercharged
artlessly and unsuspectingly. The trellised arbour in
which we ate looked out on a pleasant bend of the
steel-blue river, and in the distance, seen through a

W9

APROPOS OF DOLORES

group of slender trees, the chateau of Amboise rose like
a cluster of quartz crystals above the lesser closer
cluster of its town.

I was driving the car and we had no man with us.
A man in the car bores me, and Dolores is apt to talk
at him. Some little trouble had arisen in the engine
and when I asked for a garage Francois offered to put
things right for me and did so with skill and evident
pleasure. He had been a chauffeur. He was one of
those little fine-featured blue-eyed Frenchmen who
are essentially handymen. I saw at once that the quite
well-proportioned trellis about us and the grace of the
garden were his.

Meanwhile Marguerite dished up and served us
with a smiling skill.

They seemed to think us the happiest of windfalls,
to find in me that legendary English milor that good
French innkeepers in out of the way places still see in
their dreams, and Frangois made it clear he had never
had his head under the bonnet of a more congenial
car than mine. It occurred to me that here was just
the pacifying resting-place Dolores needed to exorcize
and banish altogether her desire to shoot that wicked
dentist in the mouth and see how he liked toothache
and generally vindicate herself for whatever he had
said or done or failed to do to her. Here we could take
up our quarters and make excursions to the various
chateaux up and down the river, with a beautiful sense
of superiority to the low, banal, hotel-fed, charabanc-
carried tourist crowd.

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DOLORES AT TORQU:^STOL

I threw out the suggestion and the Benniels were
frankly overjoyed. Straightaway they became our old
family retainers. Their little inn became ours body
and soul. There was nothing they would not do for
us. In the afternoon I rowed Dolores on the river and
she praised the beauty and interest and infinite variety
of France, comparing it to England, to the measureless
disadvantage of the latter. I agreed.

Dinner was modestly perfect with excellent Vouv-
ray. The moon appeared to have had its face specially
washed and burnished for us, and Dolores forgot her
tender face in her tendresse for me. Our room was
spotlessly clean and before we retired Marguerite had
assured us of perfect rolls and coffee in the morning.

‘Where else would you find such civilized people?'
asked Dolores.

‘Where else?’ I echoed.

Marguerite, it appeared, had been in service. She
was ready to do any little stitching or ironing that
Madame required. It would be a great delight to her
she said, and remind her of happier, less anxious days.

In these benign circumstances Dolores blossomed
out into a very great lady indeed. She was quick to
avail herself of the services of a landlady who had once
been a lady’s maid, many little things had to be done
for her, and as I smoked in the trellised arbour in a
state of unusual contentment I heard a steady and
most satisfactory flow of conversation upstairs.

Dolores was talking in a steady undulating flow
and with the utmost refinement and condescension.

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Marguerite was replying with a responsive deference.
She was learning very rapidly that I was a very wealthy
man who published books not so much for profit as for
the love of publishing and for the immense though
unostentatious political influence it gave me, and that
Dolores was a princess by a previous marriage^ though
she no longer used the title^ and also, through her
Scotch father and the Stewart clan, distantly connected
with the British royal family. And also Marguerite
was being questioned, about her past, about her pre-
sent, about her passions. Had she no children? A son
already in the army, that was all. The tragedy of
Dolores’ life was unveiled^ her intense desire for off-
spring. Her passion for me also, her devotion, her
insatiable devotion. Always, I learnt, I had refused her
a child. That was new to me. Did Marguerite love her
husband? Yes, but like that? There was an urgent
pressure for details. Marguerite it seemed did not
want to think too much of such things nowadays. Tas
souvent. . . . Pas beaucoup. . . . Mais non madame.
Pas comme ca. . . . Jamais madame.’ She had other
anxieties. The little inn was not paying. At times she
regretted leaving service. . . .

Marguerite was a woman inclined to a wholesome
plumpness with a sane and sweet and pleasant face, a
healthy complexion and a quietly observant eye. I
found it fixed on me with a calculating approval. She
and I liked each other from the outset and we have
always hked each other. But she was, I felt, doubtful
about Dolores.

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DOLORES AT TORQU^lSTOL

Dolores had no doubts of her. She pronounced her
a simple but highly intelligent woman, a peasant in-
deed, but with a remarkable understanding. Dolores
spread herself before her as if she were a mirror, a
particularly flattering mirror. So rarely was she under-
stood. She told how she loved the beautiful simplicity
of this inn. How weary she was of the stresses and
falsities of social life in Paris, how corrupt, how im-
moral was the smart society in which she mingled,
how she doubted at times whether she was not really
intended for the religious life. If it were not for me
she believed she might already be in retreat, a great
lady-abbess perhaps. But she had me to consider. I
was so naive, so dependent and so incalculable. She
had to dress, she had to sustain a brilliant appearance
for my sake - often though she was sad and weary at
heart. She saw through things, but I was shallower
and happier.

I did my best not to hear this expansion of Dolores,
opening out, a great familiar flood, I did all I could to
avoid being produced in evidence, appealed to and ex-
hibited. From the outset I thought I noticed a certain
something, a sub-twinkle, as it were, in the eye of
Marguerite at these confessions, but as this twinkle
did not seem to be perceptible to Dolores I dismissed it
from my mind.

The little inn was not paying. Marguerite hesi-
tated before she disposed of it and committed herself
to us, and I know that it was because she thought I
was trustworthy that she surrendered at last. She made

185

APROPOS OF DOLORES

all the business arrangements, because she was a
managing woman. She managed the inn, she managed
her husband, and when we installed her and Francois
as our Parisian menage I have no doubt she felt equal
to managing Dolores and myself. And perhaps she
could have done so. To begin with, things were a
marvellous success. Dolores bragged of her cook and
her good-looking chauffeur to all her friends. Un-
sophisticated indeed, she said, but the vrai cuisine
frarigaise. And she talked constantly to Marguerite
and told her her life story and her emotional experiences
over and over again in a great variety of ways.

But obscure things happened during the time I was
in Sweden. I do not know what happened, but quite
possibly nothing worse than that Dolores suddenly be-
came aware of the twinkle in the eye of Marguerite.
Marguerite was something of a mimic. Maybe one
day Dolores went quietly along the passage to her
kitchen and discovered how she really looked and
sounded to her devoted servants. If there was more
to it than that Marguerite has never told me. Until
that crisis, for the better part of a year our flat was
more peaceful and comfortable than it has ever been
before or since.

Then one day I returned unexpectedly to Paris to
find Marguerite in tears, Francois in indignant revolt,
and the pair under a fortnight’s notice to depart.
Marguerite, damp but doing her duty meticulously to
the last, told me of the blow that had fallen upon them.
Francois said nothing to me; he didn’t know what to

184

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

say, but he went about his duties muttering ‘merd’ -
to Madame, to Paris, to the flat, to domestic service, to
the universe and finally when he found that I was
powerless to reinstate him, to me. Gently but distinctly
he was very unhappy.

‘But why have you done this?’ I protested to
Dolores.

‘Will you please leave our domestic arrangements
to me.’

‘But you cannot possibly fire these people out with-
out a reason. They sold their little place to come to us.’

‘Fine place they sold! They fastened themselves
upon us. Like leeches.’

When I persisted reason departed. They were her
enemies. Always I sided with her enemies against her.
She could not live in the same flat with them.

‘I insist that you tell me more about this business.’

‘You insist - you insist!’ Dolores grimaced and
screamed. flat and my servants. What was it

they used to do in England? Dish cloot? Dish clowat?
Do you want a dish clowat pinned to your tails,
Steenie?’

^Helir I swore and she knew that for the moment
she had won. The poor Benniels were bundled out
neck and crop. Marguerite in reproachful tears, and I
had to set about helping them furtively into a pitiful
little back-street shop near-by. We had contrived to
spoil their lives and turn all their bright expectations to
bitterness, and it was I with my false appearance of
firmness and trustworthiness, who had exposed them

185

APROPOS OF DOLORES

to Dolores’ temperamental incompatibility - with any
other human being.

That is the sort of thing that baffles me; something
I can’t turn off with a jest. I am made a defaulter in
my promises, explicit or implicit. I can invent a laugh
for nearly every other of our differences but not about
Lettice or the Benniels. In both these cases I feel I am
falsified and dishonoured, and that is a feeling that it
is difficult to deal with humorously. I hate to see any
servant or employee let down. These economic in-
feriors are essentially a weak class. They can be tire-
some and exasperating at times, but what a life of
deferential uncertainty they have to lead! And how
could we live without them? Only a utopian re-
organization of services could dispense with them.
Almost all of them distrust our powers of interference
and injury, and they do so with excellent reason. The
Benniels banked on me. Marguerite with the tranquil
face and steady eyes had considered me, judged me
and after the fashion of her type, put her unlimited
trust in me.

Since the expulsion of the Benniels our flat has seen
a succession of servants, none of whom have gained
any hold on my affections during their cycle of favour
and confidence, sudden recrimination, persecution,
notice and ignominious dismissal. I have preserved an
Olympian aloofness to their storms and distresses. As
the crisis becomes acute I hear the call of the business.
Our present internal mdnage is a married couple from
Alsace, the Schweitzers, plus Marie, Alphonse and a

186

DOLORES AT TORQUl^STOL

maid. Marie is still in the confidence of her mistress.
The Schweitzers are sinister and sidelong and very
deferential. The man squints, has a lantern jaw and
is very officious. He valets me fussily, he is butler at
tables he has an assiduous usefulness. He is particu-
larly skilful with the repair of small domestic gadgets
and I should think he could pick locks. He is the sort
of man who seems able to materialize in your room
quite silently without opening the door. At first he
seemed like developing a feud with Alphonse and I
hoped for revelations, but now there is an understand-
ing and Alphonse is welcome in the kitchen.

But if these poor dears conspire to peculate. Heaven
help them when they are found out, for Dolores has a
marvellous nose and no mercy for petty peculation.

§11

It is a minor matter but it is in the same vein, that
I am on tenter-hooks about the spotted waiting maid.
There is a queer streak of morbid fear in Dolores
against infection, and short of leprosy, there is only
one form of infection of which she seems able to think.
Show Dolores a spot or a stain on a human face and
syphilis leaps to her mind. But these particular spots
are obviously the sort of spots with which God sees fit
to mock the chastity of a certain type of adolescent.
Dolores forgets about that maid for a day or two and
then it comes back to her. I find the lorgnette
scrutinizing the projected victim. One of these days

187

APROPOS OF DOLORES

I know she will get up and insist upon an inquiry in
the bureau. I shall see her going off to the bureau with
a peculiar intentness, with nervous but resolute move-
ments of her jewelled hands. Useless for me to inter-
vene. ‘This is my affair, Steenie,’ she will say. ‘This
is my affair.’

If she does do so, it is very likely the Hunots will
send the girl away. Of course if they are sensible
people they will just pretend to send her away and
arrange to keep her out of sight of Dolores, but I am
not at all sure of the Hunots.

Again it is an almost negligible bother in itself and
one, that but for my growing exasperation with
Dolores, I might find indelicately amusing, that the
English mother and son no longer wish me a cordial
^Bong Mattong’ and ^Bong swa’ and hurry past me
with averted faces. But I feel rather than know fully
and precisely what has happened in that quarter.

From me they are merely averted, but the ap-
pearance of Dolores produces a sort of white embarrass-
ment, a strenuous, a convulsive blindness to her on the
part of the son. He has obviously never cut anyone in
his life before — and it affects his respiration, he blows,
it destroys his muscular adjustment. On the part of
Mamma there is a frank betrayal of shocked horror.
She becomes more than normally henlike. She clucks
to her son to come to her side. She quivers even more
than the old Baroness and becomes incredibly haughty
lest she should collapse altogether. She has, I realize,
been shocked beyond measure.

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

What has happened so far as I can guess has been
that somewhere in the precincts, on the terrace perhaps
after dinner, Dolores has accosted the youth and had a
quiet talk with him. I know in fact that she asked him
whether he was a virgin. First, because I know it is a
common gambit with the women of Dolores’ set when
they meet growing boys, and secondly because the
other night Dolores launched out upon a tirade against
the hypocritical innocence and bashfulness of British
youth. ‘A French boy of his age,’ she began,
know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

The sexual education of the adolescent male and
the relative merits of the men of various nations as
lovers are topics of inexhaustible interest to all those
ladies in Dolores’ brilliant rustling circle. The Ameri-
cans as lovers are always understood to be no good, no
good at all, and the English hardly better. They suffer
under the stigma of sentimentality. They are excitable
but inconsiderate. At the other end of the scale the
vast but repulsive prowess of le n^gre and le gorille are
glanced at. Rasputin is a special case, still quoted.
They go over this stuff again and again. They roll
their imaginations over it. A lover ceases to be a loverj
he is a technician, he is a violinist under the scrutiny
of a connaisseuse. Affection flutters away irom this
awful stuff in infinite distress, rather like our scared
English lady. The interest in the sexual apprenticeship
of son or nephew is worked up to a feverish preoccupa-
tion. It is very important to save him, at any cost,
from misdirected desires. There are aunts 5 there are

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

dear friends ready to vindicate normality. There is a
whole literature of the subject 5 deeply sentimental
novels, very grave, very tender - for facetiousness
would spoil everything. Don’t for a moment call it
pornography. It is literary conversation^ it is sociology.

These things drift by me; I try to be incurious but
I am neither deaf nor blind. ‘This is my affair,
Steenie!’ At every age men must be taken care of and
deceived for their own good.

‘Did he know what a virgin isT I asked.

‘He thought it was a religious young woman,’ she
said.

Her indignation grew. ‘Steenie, that boy of six-
teen - just leaving his public school and going to
Oxford - did not know anything about virginity.’

‘Are you so sure? Maybe he didn’t want to discuss
it with you. I suppose he looked extremely uncom-
fortable and got up and went away.’

‘Imagine it!’

‘And then you tried to have just a nice quiet little
sit-down gossip with Mamma about him?’

‘She went scarlet and pretended not to understand.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said — like
that — and got up and walked indoors.’

‘Leaving you bursting with talk?’

‘It is stupid not to talk. What are we given speech
for? God showers his gifts upon you English people — ’

‘And we practise reserve. Not so much as we did
though - No. Why do you always rush sex to the front,
Dolores, in any conversation you start with a stranger?’

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DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

I took a chair and sat down by the chaise longue on
which she was reclining. I had had some ideas busy
in my head for several days.

‘Am I going to be preached at?’ she asked. ‘On the
score of decency? By yoz/?’

I lit a cigar. ‘I want to tell you one or two things/
I said. ‘And hear what you have to say.’

‘I could tell you more than one or two things about
yourself if I chose to be plain with you.’

This time I really wanted to talk to her and I did
not intend to be put off by an obvious repartee. ‘This
habit of bringing all your talk round to sex and filth.
This perpetual lewdness.’

‘Who did I learn it from?’

‘I’ve never found out. Probably at your polyglot
school down there in Monaco. It’s’ - I had a phrase
ready -- ‘a contagious disease of the mind. And when
we travel like this and meet ordinary decent people
who are unaffected, it becomes an unendurable offence.
Unendurable I say. This holiday since you joined me
here, has irritated and bored me — ’

‘Is this another of your ultimatums, Steenie?’

‘Well, it didn’t begin like that.’

She sat up and adopted the defensive offensive.

‘Steenie, I wonder why I love you. Why I endure
you. There you sit, solemn, dull, a bourgeois book-
seller, English, male — as stupid as a bull. You are like
a heavy unteachable boy. Your only merit is a sort of
uncritical sense of obligation.’ (‘I want to tell you,’ I
said.) ‘Once I was one of the most brilliant women on

APROPOS OF DOLORES

the Riviera, accustomed to gentlemen^ to men of title,
to princes, to men of the world, to unquestioning
gallantry. What am I now? What have you done to
me? Everyone says that since our marriage I have
become almost as dull as you are. You have robbed me
of animation, of elan. The change they say is mar-
vellous. Ask any of my friends, ask your own cousin
John, ask your own business men who come to Paris.’
(T want to tell you,’ I said.) ‘And now you come to
me like a schoolmaster. ‘T want a few words with you,
Madame.” Still I go too far. Still I’m not sufficiently
banale. I suppose I am to look at you and catch your
eye before I speak. I suppose — ’

There was no stopping her flow of talk now that she
was fairly launched upon it. The only thing possible
now was to begin talking myself heedless of what she
might be saying, and this I began to do. T want to
tell you,’ I said, and proceeded with my topic.

We had opened the engagement at a fairly low
pitch but now that I was going on with what I wanted
to tell her our duet rose in a steady crescendo. I said
that this vacation had bored me beyond endurance,
that the older I grew the less could I endure being the
passive supporter of her extravaganza, that since I
could not restrain her I meant to leave her and that
at any cost I was determined to leave her for good and
all.

We gathered a furtive audience, the Hunots inside
the salle manger, a maid below, two of the postcard
sellers, a gentleman at the other end of the veranda

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consuming a sirop. Maybe there were others. As she
grew aware of this accumulation of attention she
changed over more and more to French to give them
a fuller benefit of her discourse and she went faster
and shriller, as glimpses of what I had to say got
through to her, and might possibly get through to our
hearers. Her curiosity to know what I was saying so
steadily, was overcome heroically. On she went along
her own line.

The two voices fought, a drum, a bass drum, trying
to drown cymbals.

‘Let me tell you, Mr. Steenie,’ said she.

‘I want you to understand,’ said I.

It was ridiculous, it was shameful. At last I tried
to rise with dignity and then forgetting my dignity
leant over her to deliver a parting shot. ‘There is a
limit,’ said I, repeating my worn-out refrain. ‘There
is a limit.’ Unfortunately I marred my withdrawal by
knocking over a small round tin table, bearing an
empty glass and a tray which fell with a resounding
crash.

‘Please replace that,’ I said to the spotted maid whe
appeared with suspicious alacrity upon the scene. ‘Please
replace and charge to my account,’ and departed in-
gloriously, leaving Dolores reclining back on her chaise
longue with all the honours of war, a great lady of the
world, fatigued.

‘Pouf!’ she said for the benefit of the audience.
^Quel maladroit! Mon amant! Mais c’est drole!’

N

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

§ 12

This sort of thing, this sort of jabber-battle, is the
nearest I am ever likely to get to my wife’s mind.
Never will she listen^ never will she attempt to under-
stand. Whatever freakish interpretation she chooses
to put upon our relationship, she will fight for with
screams and vituperation. There is no dealing with
her. I sit here now at my desk with this diary before
me, asking myself what sort of entanglement I live
in and just what I intend to do to escape from it. For
in some way I will get out of this unendurable way of
living.

Something much more thorough than I have done
hitherto has to be done.

There are, I admit, these lengthening absences to
exasperate her. We are both changing. I cease to
laugh in my sleeve at her^ I disregard her feelings as
I never used to do. I scarcely hide my contempt for
her tawdry sayings and doings. That secret laughter
did much to keep alive the amused sort of affection I
bore her. It seems to me, but that may be the effect
of use and wont upon me, that her mind has hardened
and deteriorated in late years. The last freshness of
youth has departed from her. She repeats herself.
Many of her topics came up like gramophone records.
She talks more and more, she listens and reads less and
her incessant self-centred flow becomes cheaper in
quality and more monotonous every time I have to

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hear it. Quite apart from the discomfort her irritating
aggressions create for me I am wearied by her endless
reiterations. The forced and artificial buoyancy I try
to sustain is less and less effective against her voice. I
just cannot go on listening to it.

What is really the matter with her? What is the
matter with us? We quarrelled about her indecent
conversation. Why does she plaster her talk and
particularly her English talk with clumsy outrages on
the conventions?

Sitting in judgment on her here, I do not find she
is really an oversexed person any more than she is ab-
normally crooked sexually. She is normally sensual
and she is unstable, but she is not a wanton. Her pose
varies from the great lady to the gaminesque. She is
a gaminesque Mediterranean lady. She uses an ab-
normal quantity of shocking words and has a sort of
sham-scientific scandalizing knowledge in this sphere,
but though I find her tiresome and vulgar about it
and though I think the habit grows upon her I do not
find her disgusting. She is not really mentally ob-
sessed. She talks simply to startle and shock.

Physical obsession with sex is a transitory state of
affairs with an easy remedy, but imaginative obsession
with sex is the most dangerous and incurable of con-
tagious diseases. The mind afllicted becomes like that
of a cocaine addict. The drive to talk about ht’, to
elaborate ht’, to invent something unheard-of about
this really very simple business, becomes uncon-
trollable. Perpetually the topic is obtruded, dragged

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

in. Heman Soapstone, old Blades and Loretta Hook
are the real thing, sexualizing everything, drooling
their stale decaying obscenities wherever they go, like
a curse put upon them. Pitiful and repulsive con-
versational lepers they are. Dolores isn’t that.

It isn’t a diseased imagination that impels Dolores
to indecency, it is something quite different and innate^
it is a devouring insatiable egotism. She must have
attention, she must focus attention, at any cost — and
she found quite early in life that the most effective
way for a young woman to hold the attention of the
guests at a lunch party or dinner party was to be
frankly improper. A pretty young woman got a few
glances and a few furtive advances, but everyone
turned with raised eyebrows and an amused expecta-
tion to an animated young woman with no restraint
upon her tongue, with a great collection of improper
words and a penetrating voice.

And come to think of it, Dolores has no idiosyn-
crasies in any direction whatever, except this blank
craving for notice. I have never known her do a
really original thing. . . .

Light breaks upon me! Her gestures, her style,
her costume, her scent, her accent, her mannerisms,
her dogs and decorations, the values she sets upon
things, her wildly fluctuating judgments, are a jack-
daw collection picked up anyhow and gripped and held
together with tremendous tenacity. She has accumu-
lated this composite self because she thought its in-
gredients contributed to her effectiveness. There is no

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DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

Other principle of selection. It is an accumulated self,
it is an undigested self. Most other human beings, the
psycho-analysts explain, are under compulsion to do
this or that irrelevant thing, they have an uncon-
trollable bias that gives them character, but she is
under no compulsion at all to modify her plagiarisms
and imitations. She has no repressions. She has a
bright acquisitive brain, clear because it is unhampered
by any internal resistances, and she learns and repeats,
forgetting nothing, qualifying nothing, but intensify-
ing everything because of the lack of any toning per-
sonal tint of her own. So far from being abnormal she
is normal to the exclusion of an individual difference.
She is a human being stripped down to its bare egotism.
She is assertion and avidity incarnate. She is the most
completely, exclusively and harshly assembled indi-
viduality I have ever encountered.

It is just because she is bare, like a planet without
atmosphere, that she has baffled me so long. It is only
now at last that I realize that she is just common
humanity unmitigated. I have been getting down to
that through a dozen puzzled years. So far from having
to deal with a complicated person I begin to realize I
have been dealing with a case of extravagant sim-
plicity. I can’t treat her as either a lunatic or a
criminal. She is the foundation stuff of humanity.
She is a common woman in a state of chemical purity.

And my basic structure and everybody’s basic
structure is woven of much the same stuff, but tinted,
mercerized - is that the word? - glazed over, trimmed,

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

loaded down? It is just the lack of that mitigating some-
thing else that makes her different from other people.

Now let me sit down and examine this instinctively
fundamental human being from whom I have to de-
tach myself. The first conspicuous thing about her is
this craving for attention. (Are any of us free from
that?) Why does she want attention? Why do any of
us want attention? Is it a craving for love or, turning
it inside out, hate? I don^t think so. I doubt if any of
us have a simple desire for love as such. What she
seems to be after when she embarks upon one of her
crescendos of showing off, is anything but affection 5
her nature is much more aggressive. It is to rouse a
sense of inferiority and admiration in her hearers. It
is to impose herself upon the absent and the present.
It is to achieve a sense of triumphant existence. That
is the climax of the orgasm. That must be held as long
as possible. That is her simple and sole satisfaction.
And it takes a malignant form because it is so much
easier at any level to detract and hurt than to charm.

Now if this is true that Dolores is the normal
human being stripped down to the bone, then this
same fundamental drive to compete and feel one is
triumphantly existent must be in me and you and all
of us. It may be qualified or corrected in some way
but it will be there. Let us for a change pin out Mr.
Stephen Wilbeck upon the dissecting board. Shall we
find a male Dolores at the heart of him? He doesn’t
shout, he doesn’t brag and drown his opponent. No.
Quite the little gentleman!

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DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

But now consider what he does. I have been read--
ing over the opening chapters of this manuscript, the
part about the high road, the sunshine and Rennes andl
all that, and I remark how pleasantly he chuckles over
and tickles and caresses every human being he meetSy
as though he loved them. He observes their rather
petty activities, how lovably petty they are, he weaves
quaint belittling fancies round them, notes their
human absurdities. He does not obtrude himself at
all, but he remains from first to last in his private
imagination floating over them like a kindly divinity.
The sense of triumphant existence - at least of suc-
cessful existence - is the end sought in both cases. He
gets it more subtly and skilfully and successfully than
Dolores, that is all the difference. He does not try to
rend it out of these others^ he steals away with it.
And instead of screams, threats, dismissals and so on
towards servants, he gets the upper hand of them by
creating a sense of obligation. Is there really a passion
for fair play in him? Or does he merely like the people
about him to feel that he is fair and trustworthy?
Does he care for them as people or minions? I ought
to know but I don’t. Let us put a query to that. In
the scales of a real divinity sitting among the stars, I
doubt whether even on the score of ego-centredness
the beam of the moral balance would kick against
Dolores. It would tilt but not kick. Her egotism is
crude and bare^ it is more primitive 5 it lies naked —
flayed ~ on the inflexible limitations of her life, and
there it screams with resentment, suspicion and envy.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

He has an integument. As Foxfield would put it
iie is complicated by neo-morphs.

So, until at last now a fair challenge to his honour
and self-respect has arisen, he has been able to get
along by jesting about life, he has been able to profess
a light heart, to evade and get away by himself, to
deride Dolores’ frantic struggle to establish a pride
about herself, and to be scandalized at her flaming
malice - against life.

That anyhow is the case for Dolores. . . .

But-

I am both judge and party in this private trial, and
I do not see why a certain desire to pose before myself
as an impartial judge, should bias my verdict against
myself. I have stated her case and now I will put in a
plea for myself. There is something between Dolores
and me that is in my favour. Our difference is not
simply that I am more subtle and elaborate than she.
In many matters she can be much more intricate than
I. But I am not wholly an ego, and she is. There is
a certain good in me that she has not, there is some-
thing in my make-up going beyond my egotism, that
I am justified in defending, even ruthlessly, against
her devastating attacks.

§13

Since I wrote the last passage I have been for a
cigarette-consuming stroll among the tumbled rocks of

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DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

the gorge and returned to dine with Dolores in frozen
silence in the dining-room. I hesitated at the post
oiBice whether I would send the code telegram to
Durthing that would have brought me an urgent
summons thither^ ‘printers’ strike impending’. I de-
cided not to do so. I detest these little deceptions. I
am ashamed of them in my own eyes. I have played
the fugitive hen-pecked mari of the farces too often.

The salle a manger was pervaded by an air of
general crisis, and the most persistent sound was the
soft rustling of the old Baroness as she turned to
scrutinize one table after another. ‘What can have
happened?’ her lorgnette inquired. Particularly of me.
The English mother and son never said a word^ they
read books. The son’s ears were bright scarlet and he
moved rarely and stiffly.

There was only one fisherman. He dined rather
early and when he had dined he sat for a moment
staring in front of him, said ‘Gorf/’ with a note of
extreme astonishment and got up and departed. Some
newcomers remained mouselike throughout. A mo-
mentary impulse to speech was caused by the spotted
girl dropping and breaking three plates suddenly and
dreadfully, but nothing came of it. She wailed for a
moment but the stern stillness overcame her. We
lapsed into rigor as she sniffed and picked up the frag-
ments. For a few moments Monsieur Hunot surveyed
the company over the frosted glass of the door, but he
did not make his usual round of amiability. His heart
failed him.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

I wondered whether I had not made a mistake
about that telegram.

After dinner Dolores got up, stood still, and looked
at me very meaningly. I stood to attention. She
bowed and passed me with dignity. I went out on the
veranda to smoke and drink some brandy - 1 felt I
needed brandy - and presently Marie came with a
note.

^My love,

‘You sat at dinner like a small, pudgy, obstinate,
wicked little boy. You are wrong, you are so wrongs so
wrong-hearted - but like a child. My heart goes out
to you. I cannot let the sun go down upon my wrath.
I forgive you. I cannot sleep in hate. Give me one
little moment, open my door and say “Good night” to
me. Then I will take my Semondyle and sleep.
Remember I am in pain and still very ill. You know
nothing of pain. Some day perhaps you will. It will
be good for you. But maybe then I shall sleep and
stop thinking of that incompetent fool of a dentist who
has ravaged my life. Whom you allowed to ravage
my life ~ making no proper inquiries. Against whom
you will not even bring an action for damages — for
fear of taking my part. To-morrow we will go to
Roscoff as we arranged and I will make myself agree-
able to this scientific hack writer of yours — what is his
name? Pox or Fox or something. Foxfield? How I
shall yawn inside! My abominable child! One of these
days you will drown me in your English dullness.’

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DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

I read the note and after due consideration nodded
to Marie. I wanted to see Foxfield. His copy was in
arrears again.

So that was settled and this crisis was to end in the
usual way.

I ordered some more brandy.

§ 14

How long are we to go on like this? How many
people are there in the worlds I wonder, who wake up
in the morning to a situation they are convinced is
intolerable, who say as I say, ^This must end: I will
stand it no longer’, and at night find themselves still in
the same intolerable situation? There are times when
I feel that all humanity lives in traps, gripped by obliga-
tions they have incurred, born caged from the first in
the menagerie. Nowadays our developing psychological
analysis stresses the role of the escape mechanisms
in our minds - they should be called our pseudo-
escape mechanisms. That kindly humour of mine is a
case in point. In spite of it my life is being more and
more conditioned by Dolores. Are we all of us jammed
hopelessly in this drifting inertia? Is all life a drifting
inertia, an endless band of flypaper? Are all the people
about me full of suppressed vows to ‘do something’ —
against the enslaving partner, the undetachable
associate, the tangle of obligations — to families, to
legal undertakings, to professions, feuds, routines,
habits? . . .

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

I resume the problem of the incompatibility be-
tween Dolores and myself. Where were we?

We had concluded that Dolores was a particularly
simplified person^ a far more completely isolated,
logical and self-centred human being than the
generality. She was so completely individualized, she
was so much what every individual is and so little what
every individual is not, that she lacked a distinctive
individuality. That was our first finding. She was
without a sort of variable, supplementary, hesitating
undertow that operates in most human beings. Her
stolon was broken. Her detachment was unqualified.
She could not extend beyond her edges and boundaries.
She could not forget herself. And since all individuals
are, as individuals, doomed to defeat, since the outer
world manifestly overrules and outlives them, her life
has been necessarily a bitter struggle against the ad-
mission of her essential finality. She fights like a
naughty child. She can concede nothing. She can
allow nothing nor forgive anything. Someone else
must do that.

The more normal mind is more complicated than
hers 5 it is not so completely within the egotism. Quite
a lot of it operates outside the drama of the triumph or
frustration of the A large part of our self-education
and our general training in conduct, is an adjustment
between these outer non-egoistic motives and the
desire for unqualified and triumphant self-assertion.
Compared with Dolores, Mr. Stephen Wilbeck, we
decided ~ was in certain unspecified ways different.

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DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

We have implied that this difference lies in the fact
that though he too is egotistical, he is not entirely
made up of his own structural egotism. That is indeed
his moral framework, but there is a lot of extra matter
wrapped about it. We have now to get clear if we can
about the nature of this extra matter.

A part of his being is evidently reservation and
discretion — a deference. There is a sort of councillor^
primarily devoted to his egotism, no doubt, but never-
theless functioning as a sort of family solicitor in his
make-up, who says continually, ‘Do you think -
and ‘Must you go as far as that? Have you considered
that there are others concerned in this?^ Possibly this
something that was only present as a germ in the
infant, but which has been developed by the con-
ditions of his upbringing. It was there to train and
so it has been trained. It has grown into a mitigating
mental habit system that is now his second nature.
His self-assertion has become so qualified that he now
has a positive satisfaction in considering others and
subordinating that primordial impulse to triumph
over them, to their approval and acquiescence.

Part of these elaborations about his ego are no
doubt ascribable to his happier upbringing. His
triumph over them is that they do not know he
triumphs over them. Dolores’ childhood was spent
amidst much more vehement circumstances; the
atmosphere of her convent school was rank with a
stimulated competitiveness. Learning in the type of
school she attended was neither done under compulsion

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

and punishment, after the ancient fashion, nor evoked
through curiosity and the desire for performance in
the modern style. It was a convent school in the Jesuit
tradition, effort was stimulated by incessant displays,
lists and changes of precedence, prize-givings, public
and private praising, public humiliations, confessions
and the like. She was trained to compete and be a
winner, to take a pride simply in winning - a
poisonous training for any child and the more successful
it is the more pernicious are its effects. She got the full
benefit of that.

Yet after making full allowance for this difference
in our upbringing, I feel there is a broad margin of
divergence still to be accounted for. We started in-
trinsically different. We did not start merely as
different individuals, we started as different sorts of
individuals. My interest in my egotism is not only
less intense and more provisional by reason of my
training, but also I have a sense of responsibility about
scientific truth, about the truth of historical statement,
about the general welfare of the community, about the
beauties and decencies of town and country which she
certainly does not feel. I do not mean that I have had
these interests from the beginning, but they grew, just
as my moustache grew, as my mind opened. I believe
that the sort of person to which I belong has these
natural impersonal solicitudes, just as I believe that
her sort has not. But except for this belief of mine that
there are such sorts, I find it very difficult to define them
or associate them with any other characteristics. . . .

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DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

§ 15

I sit here musing over types of human being. I
muse now more than I write because the hour is
late and my mind is losing intensity and becoming
diffuse. . . .

We of the intelligentsia are always generalizing
about humanity, simplifying its movements to explain
them more easily, and dividing it in the most hap-
hazard and uncritical way. What shallow hasty head-
long minds we have, all of us! The best of us! What
stuff our literature and in particular our history is! -
up to now. I write this as a publisher. Some sort of
classification of humanity seems necessary for many
human activities, but much of what we have is more
like the imaginations of vast, solemn, overgrown chil-
dren, playing at thought as pompously as possible, than
active adult minds thinking. ^History, ^ said Henry
Ford, meaning all written history, hs bunk.’ What
intuitions that man has had! How completely I agree
with him!

History! What rows of lopsided books come to
mind - from that poor old gossiping propagandist
Herodotus to the distorting patchworks of to-day!
When shall we have a real spring-cleaning of the ware-
houses of history? When will the biologists and
archaeologists go in to that vast accumulation with
their mops and pails? I mean no public book-burning
of course, but I can imagine that vast quantities of

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the books we hold in respect at present will be left at
last to oxidize quietly in our attics. Swarms of erudite,
uneducated, incontinent little chaps go on and on, con-
ceiving and vni-iting these copious, misshapen books,
pretentious histories, in which ‘the Orient’ is con-
trasted with ‘the West’, ‘North’ with ‘South’, Aryan
with non-Aryan, in which the Spirit of Civilization,
never defined, marches West (or East, it doesn’t
matter), in which it has a Cradle, in which the spread
of Christianity is made accountable for the downfall of
Rome, or for the discovery of America, and Buddhism
for an alleged military inefficiency in the Chinese.
Capitalism becomes a ‘System’ organized in a malig-
nant spirit by the Puritans, whom nobody loves. And
the amazing "'movements* these historians invent! the
incredible ‘races!* . . .

Most alleged ethnological classifications have idiot
faces — not so much faces indeed as dead incredible
masks clamped upon - upon sacks filled with ‘all
sorts’. These historians talk glibly of a Jewish ‘race’, of
Nordics, Alpines, Mediterraneans. They would make
a botanical species of a macedoine of fruit. They do not
seem to care, and nobody seems to care, how wildly
they classify and distinguish and oppose. And of
cultures! Hardly one of these exponents of how
humanity works, but professes an exquisite power of
judgment. That unparalleled ‘Greek Culture’! Some-
how they do believe in it. They all believe in it. Have
you ever asked yourself what it really amounted to?
With its omnipresent Corinthian capitals, its crudely

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painted buildings, its pink statues of women, its
everlasting booming Homer, its city bosses and its
hysterical heroes, all rhetoric and tears! And the un-
defined ‘golden ages’ of these historians 5 their equally
undefined ‘ages of decadence’! Anything seems accept-
able that is even faintly plausible, and off they go.

Yet we endure these Spenglers and Toynbees and
Paretos and their like and even partly read them. We
endure them. We have to endure them. At the worst
they are experimentalists in statement — though they
all refuse to listen to each other, much less to collate
themselves with each other and so oblige us by can-
celling each other out. They multiply and proliferate 5
they clog our bookshelves, they beleaguer our minds.
Their fungoid abundance of assertion renders any clear
conception of the recent human past impossible. We
live with our minds overgrown by an entirely un-
pruned jungle of historical misrepresentation. . . .

We make real efforts to read these books. We do
not believe in them but we read them and talk about
them. At the backs of our minds we feel that there
are distinctions, real and profoundly important distinc-
tions, between different kinds of human beings, and
that beneath the confused surfaces of history there are
real processes that still elude our definition. Our endur-
ance of these historical and sociological proliferations is
the mark of our helplessness. We feel, I suppose, that
maybe it is better that these interpreters, rather than
not write at all, should flounder along with these
guesses and prejudices of theirs. On approval. Only
o 209

APROPOS OF DOLORES

there is no approval, unhappily. None of them, as I
say, ever seems to notice and criticize the others.
Each galumphs about, bruising the sward of fact,
according to his fancy. There I think we have real
grounds of complaint. We are left an impossible task.
It is like the problem of our lunatic asylums 5 we have
to find better men to put aimless enterprise within
hounds. Before you can effectively explode your
Pareto, for example, and dismiss him, you have to find
a first-rate psycho-analyst sufficiently industrious to
read, anatomize and find out all about him.

As a publisher with a conscience, as a caterer for
thought, I sit in my office in a sort of despair, con-
templating the stuff going down the chute upon the
heads of my poor public below. The historical books I
issue — reluctantly but I do issue them — contem-
porary history and general history - as well as a lot
■of base but profitable twaddle about Empresses,
Napoleon, Dictators and so on - are worse even than
the endless impossible theorizings of the economists.
Those are bad enough. I have some of them, too, on
my lists, alas! But their books are just vapourings, they
wash like wavelets about rocks of concrete reality and
do not greatly affect them. While the booms and
slumps go on about them, they write as the birds sing,
mere starlings they are and shrill canaries, but the
histories on the other hand have animus, their mis-
conceptions are mischievous, they are poisonous, they
enter into life, they partake of the stuff of life, they
disorganize any collective political will, they spread

210

DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

into minds and push them askew and distort and
ultimately destroy them.

Sometimes Dolores turns her mind to discussing
world affairs. She talks this history stuff by instinct.
She talks as though I had never published a book. I
feel like a man who makes a clearing and as fast as he
makes it the jungle flows back. She lays down the law,
she generalizes about Trance’ and ‘England’ and
‘America’. She really thinks there is a large collective
insultable lady called ‘America’. She scolds ‘Germany’,
we did not punish ‘Germany’ enough, she reproaches
‘Russia’. She abandons nations to their fate. Never
will she speak to Germany again. Germany must
vStand in the corner, face to wall, and Britain must
wear a dunce’s cap. It is the most awful gabble - but
it is nothing more than the inevitable end of this mud-
chute called ‘history’. It comes to her via the Parisian
papers and sub-diplomatic chatter at third hand.

The balanced stuff I hunt out and get written and
issue she never looks at. It irritates her. You can’t
easily take sides. It perplexes her. It does not fall into
her patterns, the common established patterns of
history. She cannot read it. She wants to be rude
to it and dismiss it from existence. She waves her
hands about. She raises her voice. ‘ Je trouve,’ she says.
‘Je trouve,’ pushing away the indigestible ideas. I
have to get away from her or she would unhinge me.
When I hear her voice fluting along about these
things I begin to doubt whether the reconstruction of
men’s minds and methods to meet our new needs is

521 1

APROPOS OF DOLORES

not a fantastic dream. For in her fashion I know
millions^ so to speak, think.

I wish I knew how to help remedy this confused
acquiescence of the general mind. I wish I knew how
to brace up the phagocytes of criticism.

People must have a history of some sort and an
ethnology of some sort before they can exist politically.
And what can be expected of minds full of this drivel
of hate and vain comparisons?

Much has been done in the past decade or so to
reduce flabby stomachs. Might we not begin a move-
ment presently, to brace up flabby history? What is my
firm doing in this matter? What might it do? What am
I doing? I ought to be finding young men and women
of mental energy to start an Augean critique, a True
History School. Why am I fretting about here in
Torquestol tied to a fractious uncontrollable woman
while I ought to be in England getting on with my
job?

§i6

I think this, I write this, and yet I sit here and my
mind drifts back to its prepossession with Dolores, and
for the life of me I cannot resist the allurement of these
very vulgarities of history I have been denouncing.
Suddenly I find my head busy with them, adventitious
analogies, wild generalizations, unjustifiable assertions,
fragmentary facts.

For example, is Dolores, I ask, contrasted with me

212

DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

and antagonized to me by some difference of race? And
ignoring her Scotch father I find myself inclined to
call her ‘Oriental’, insist on the predominance of her
Armenian genes and find analogies for her conduct in
the known and alleged qualities of these acquisitive
marketing people from the Near East. Who remember
so precisely and abundantly and think so meanly. I
admit - I have no grounds for the hypothesis — a con-
siderable streak of something which I call in a pejora-
tive sense ‘Jewish’ in her make-up. I mean nothing
racial in that, I mean something simply and blankly
prejudicial. I use these terms as loosely as anyone
does, yet under this loose, unjustifiable terminology, I
can almost persuade myself that I am groping towards
a perceptible reality.

But if I drop this racial idea, I am still confronted
by these immense differences in character one finds
between man and man. And now I warn you, dear,
but I feel slightly recalcitrant reader that I have lugged
thus far, now I am really going to theorize.

Under the cloak of the apparent races of men,
under the thin and superficial disguise of colour
differences and varieties of hair, height and chest
measurement, I believe that, interbreeding together
and all mixed up together, there are certain real
human races, hereditary strains, that do not readily
lose their identity. I do not think I have been clear
in this belief hitherto, but now I see it as if it had been
in my mind for a long time indistinctly. It has been
assembled there by Foxfield and a miscellany of

^13

APROPOS OF DOLORES

biological readings and now it breaks out. There are
breeds, I find, adapted to a spacious and generalized
modern life, new variations perhaps, other breeds
essentially parasitic, others timidly docile, and again
breeds bitterly ego-centred and malignantly resistant
to adaptation. (Dolores e.g.) These breeds traverse
all recognized boundaries. It is as plain as daylight to
me now.

So far very little has been done to separate these
real breeds out. Particularly have we failed to dis-
tinguish the new types that are undoubtedly appearing.
We have missed the ingredients of the mixture and
especially the new ingredients, because we have been
thinking in terms of groups in any one of which these
new factors may appear. The uncritical distribution
of men into races, cultures and peoples has masked the
reality. Max Nordau and Lombroso indeed made some
efforts to distinguish ‘criminal’ and degenerate types,
but they lacked critical acumen, they were journalists
essentially, and they assumed a quite unjustifiable
authoritativeness in their speculations. The social
Linnaeus has still to come (and Bradfield, Clews and
Wilbeck are looking for him). The classification of
main human types and temperaments from Hippo-
crates’ down to the cerebrotonics^ somatotonics and
viscerotonics of to-day - lovely ‘scientific’ words these
and most impressive for the young — has always been
a fair field for this sort of intellectual larking, and I do
not see why I should not have my fling in it. Larking
it is. Are these types, are they breeds and strains, are

214

DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

they genetic, that is to say, or are they just classes by
circumstance and for convenience in argument, like
the ‘proletarians^ and ‘bourgeoisie’ so remarkably
imagined by the Communist rabbis?

I propose to accept the former alternative and
assert that this mankind, this race of men, like the
race of dogs, is a great mix-up of interbreeding species
with a tendency to what Foxfield calls ‘genetic re*
emergence’ - genes of a feather flock together — and
also in a state of - what is his phrase? - ‘variational
initiative’.

I do not see why I should accept any of these other
fellows’ classifications. I do not like any of them.
Thought is free, ^ Cerebrotoni& makes me think some-
how of Aldous Huxley with neuralgia, faint but pur-
suing the ideal. I set about the matter in my own
distinctive fashion. To begin with I abolish the species
Homo sapiens. I propose to replace that by a number
of species and varieties, new and old. Homo^ I declare,^
is a genus with an immense range of species, sub-
species, hybrids and mutations. For to-night anyhow^
I am going to collect my own specimens like any other
honest naturalist. First Homo Doloresiform^ a wide-
spread, familiar type, emphatic, impulsive and im-
placable. Particularly implacable. Then Homo Wil-
beckius^ probably a recent mutation, observant, in-
hibited and disingenuous. Many of those new cere-
brotonics may belong to this species. Its chief
distinction is that it is flexible. Other species there are
but this will be enough to start with. Later no doubt

215

APROPOS OF DOLORES

dozens of other species, variants, stabilized hybrids, will
become distinguishable. But for the moment let us
take the two main sub-genera of Homo^ Homo regar-
dant and Homo rampant^ the former traditional, legal
and implacable and the latter open-minded and
futuristic, making Doloresiform the type-species of the
former group and Wilbeckius of the latter.

The Dolores type has naturally imposed itself
upon my attention. If I am really to be regarded as
typically human, then according to my new theory
Dolores is not human, she is a human-looking animal
of a kind capable of interbreeding with human beings.
Or vice versa.

Here in the small hours I find the Dolores traits
very evident in history, and as the thin mists of on-
coming slumber creep across my slightly intoxicated
brain I become more and more like one of these con-
temporary historians of ours spinning his web. Curious
identifications become possible, I associate the traits of
Dolores with the warp and woof of history, I become
myself a highly intellectual, highly moral, blondish
^modern’ type, and she becomes all the acquisitive, ob-
jectionable brunet peoples in history, the peoj)les who
insist, the peoples who resist, the hnadaptables' of to-
day who created our yesterdays.

There are, I reflect, Dolores nations, races and
peoples- Always a Dolores people is a tenacious, self-
righteous people with an exaggerated past and great
claims. Its gods are always jealous gods and it takes
after them. The patriotism of such a people is a sacred

216

DOLORES AT TORQUlfeSTOL

national egotism. What it cannot do through its indi-
viduals it does all together, and usually at the top of
its voice. It will not come into any sort of general
consortium with the rest of mankind. It must be and
remain itself. It grabs every advantage in its right,
and since that is the way to get your knuckles rapped,
they do get rapped. Then its vindictiveness is relatively
enormous. It never forgets a grievance. It lives on
grievances. . . .

The time relationship of a Dolores people is quite
different from that of my sort. Its idea of the future
is not, as mine is, a magnificent progressive achieve-
ment continually opening out, forgiving everyone,
comprehending everyone, but a judgment day, a day
of bitter reckoning. . . .

Usury came to the minds of the Dolores peoples,
naturally enough, as a quite lovely idea, as a per-
petually increasing right to dominate and dun. I
think a racial nexus of Dolores people must have pro-
vided the prevalent type all over the world of early
history. They invented finance, and we live in a
financial world. It is, I am convinced, unnecessary,
but we do. We still live under the tradition of in-
extinguishable debts and everlasting claims. Their life
is deduction ad infinitum. Come what may, never
shall the wrongs and claims of Doloresland, never
shall brave little Doloresland, the remnants of the
various Dolores people, perish from the earth. For
evermore these nations shall sit at their game and lose
and win and squabble. . . . The old world was truly

217

APROPOS OF DOLORES

theirs, they made it and they fit it, and they struggle
unrelentingly against the advent of a new.

Dolores’ thin, painted, eager face pervades this
nocturnal vision of history. (I am possibly writing in
my sleep. Perhaps that is how those other fellows get
their stuff done. It explains the wild facility of their
generalizations. . . . And also I fancy I am a little
drunk. It is queer - but I have been drinking brandy
rather freely since I came to Torqudstol.) She expands
after the fashion of dreams to become all the obdurate,
grievance-cherishing, triumph-seeking people in the
world. She becomes everything that stands in the way
of a World Pax and a universal system of mutual ser-
vice. I see her down the corridors of time, the un-
yielding guardian of her own ways, refusing to adapt,
refusing to tolerate, confronting her enemies, pursuing
her malice, unable to forget her old world, unable to
learn a new one. . . .

All the great religions, all the prophets, every un-
dogmatic teacher becomes in this picture, the voice of
the new Homo trying to emerge.

But this is really an easy game! Why am I merely
a publisher? I have an unwonted feeling to-night that
I can write. Is this I am discovering here a bit more
arbitrary than Spenglerism? Is it any more pretentious
than the social philosophy of that force-loving little
Bayard of twisted history, Pareto? To-night at any
rate I am full of my own interpretations. Why should
not every one of us have his own? You start up your
theories and analogies, you hoot like a historian and

218

DOLORES AT TORQUtSTOL

the factSj the slightly limping facts and the striding
assumptions, come crowding along like people storming
a river steamer. The current is dragging at my mental
keel. I heave and bump back against the quay. The
ideas begin to take their places.

More dreamlike than ever, I seem to be on some-
thing like a ship’s bridge, and all that crowd of ideas
are dropping into fresh positions under my command.
And there are new ideas too, mixed up with age-old
prejudices, there are novel biological terms and living
generalizations — ‘revolutions in the fundamental con-
ditions of human life’ — ‘adaptation to a new synthesis’
~ ‘inadaptable types and adaptable types’ — obstinate
traditionists versus flexible moderns - shut and narrow
against open and wide. All sorts of ideas that have
been bandied about between myself and Foxfield come
up from the bottom of my mind like fermenting scum.
Man^ like the dog^ is a mixture of species:^ that is idea
enough to fit out a dozen Spenglers. (Those two
splashes you heard were ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ being
put overboard.) The JVay of the World Series seems
to be painted large upon my vessel’s side. We fly the
flag of Science and social anticipation, above the flag
of History. I thought my boat was just a launch, but
I find it is a liner. A captured liner. . . .

A new way of living — from politics to personal re-
lations. . . . Dolores versus Stephen. . . . Adaptation to
new conditions that have changed fundamentally. . . .

Where am I? How far have I got afloat without
realizing I have embarked upon a vast theory of my own?

219

APROPOS OF DOLORES

I seem to be back in my bedroom at Torqu^stol,
and the writing before me has become a wild scrawl. I
have been writing in my sleep. . . .

Some of the stuff is quite illegible.

We must consider this to-morrow. . . .

And noWj I suppose, since I do not want our real
war to break out just yet, I must go along the passage
and say ‘Good-night’ to her.

§ 1 7

(Torquestolj August '^isty 1934)

I have left this diary untouched for some days. We
went to Roscoff to see the great fig tree and the
Marine Laboratory. Dolores dressed as though she
was going to tea in the Place Venddme - what do they
call the place? All alive with new hats it is. I forget.
We met Foxfield at Roscoff as I had appointed.

At first Dolores was disposed to treat Foxfield -
since she knew that occasionally I paid him money —
with considerable condescension. He did not appear
to observe that. She also addressed several almost
audible asides to me. ‘Why do you let him come so
untidy? It is a slight on both of us. Does he never cut
that hair?’ These also, if they were heard, went un-
heeded. After one glance at her, he paid her no more
attention, until we were among the salt-water tanks,
to which he led us with a sort of round-shouldered

220

DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

determination. Then suddenly addressing himself to
her, he began a lucid and detailed account of the love-
life of the octopus.

T find it the most hideous of created things/ she had
said.

‘But consider its sensitiveness/ he remonstrated,
becoming extraordinarily like an octopus himself as he
said it, and then, with a touch of wonder, ‘See! It is
looking at you.’

Dolores became interested. ‘Mind you - they don’t
often take notice of things outside the glass,’ Foxfield
said very gravely, and regarded her with a speculative
eye, as though he sought some reason for it.

Dolores made an elegant gesture at the uncoiling
creature in the corner. ‘C’est un monstre,’ she said
relenting, noted a sort of invitation in an extending
arm, and was reluctant to turn away.

^But in those unfolding undulating movements -a
certain grace?’

‘A certain grace,’ she admitted. ‘Yes.’

‘Sophisticated perhaps. But could a man do that?
See! ThereV

‘M’m’m,’ she considered.

‘Few people realize the capacity for passion among
marine animals,’ Foxfield went on in that ample, soft,
slightly piggish voice of his, and it dawned upon me
that in his own peculiar way he meant to get even
with her for that preliminary phase of patronage.
‘Mind you - floating in the sea as they do - un-
distracted by gravitation . . .’

221

APROPOS OF DOLORES

This was a new idea to Dolores.

‘Like painted Gods upon a ceiling/ said Foxfield.

‘Naturally/ she agreed, reflected, and then
pursued knowledge. ‘But in water - do they make
love? Can they?’

‘Incessantly. For example . . .’

It was a new view of an aquarium to Dolores that
it could be an arena of passion.

‘For example - ?’ she echoed.

Foxfield hesitated for a moment and sought my
eye. His large loose mouth was interrogative. But he
found nothing in my eye to restrain him, and with a
sort of modest reluctance, speaking very gently, he
proceeded to instruct Dolores in the hidden ways of
nature. I had never realized before how much livelier
an imagination he has than Creation, and what a
brighter world we should have had if affairs had been in
the hands of this trained biologist.

‘Of course,’ he said with an apologetic sigh, ‘the
sea here gets a lot of warm water from the gulf stream
- a lot of warm water. Even the vegetables in this
part of Brittany are - ’ he sank his voice - ^ precocious.^

‘Yes?’ said Dolores.

‘Even the early flowers. When English bulbs are
still in the nursery. And there is a great fig tree — but
you will see that for yourself . . . But consider these
dogfish. Now they . . .’

I see no reason for recording the coarse selachian
scandals he retailed to her.

Dolores was so artlessly interested that she forgot

222

DOLORES AT TORQUi:STOL

to be the ultra-fashionable lady altogether. She
became the last and brightest and indeed slightly
gaminesque pupil of a great savant, who told her things,
wonderful things, that he had never been able to
unfold before to so quick and intelligent a mind.

He talked and talked, gravely but unedifyingly,
and grew more and more solemnly happy as he talked.

She was much excited by the idea of sea water as
something into which an infinitude of spawn and
gonads were perpetually liberated, as Foxfield
explained, ‘without the slightest precautions’, and the
more she pursued this subject the more disordered his
hair became, the more wicked his great spectacle-
magnified eyes, and the more gravely preposterous
his slowly enunciated biological exaggerations. The
life of the ocean became an orgy tempered by massacre.
^But they hardly notice they are eaten,’ he said.

I had never seen Dolores in such eager pursuit of
knowledge, and when Foxfield appealed to me to con-
firm his statement that Tritons and Mermaids were
‘conceivable — in actual practice I mean — conceivable’
— I did so, like one who betrays the arcana.

‘Of course they hush it up,’ said Foxfield very
confidentially.

‘And now, Steenie,’ she said, ^you see how sound
my instinct was!’

‘?!’ said Foxfield by means of a suitable noise.

‘Against bathing in the sea.’

‘There was a young lady of Sark,’ began Foxfield,
and then turned away and blew his nose violently,

225

APROPOS OF DOLORES

His feelings were suddenly too much for him. Over
his handkerchief he watched his effect upon me. Was
he going too far? I looked judicious. My eye counselled
moderation. For a time he desisted from the topic of
the salt salacious sea. I doubt if anything further is
known about the young lady of Sark. It becomes just
one more Mystery of the Sea.

That trip to Roscoff was indeed an unexpected
success. Dolores explained to Foxfield how superior
the marine laboratories there were to the marine
biological station at Plymouth - which she heard of
for the first time - and how inferior the British
scientific mind was to the clear logic of the Latins.
‘You dream/ she said, ‘you dream. Your women do
not wake you up and inspire you. Look at Steenie?
What would he be if he never came to France?’

said Foxfield and looked at me accusingly
with magnified eyes.

And when we contemplated the great fig tree in
the Enclos des Capucins, she made us both jump and
look round guiltily for nuns^ for their flavour still
lingers in the place^ by her remark^, coming clear and
abrupt out of a pensive stillness, ‘Regard it, Steenie.
A chic costumier could not have invented a better
leaf. It almost makes one believe in what you call
Papa Bible, all over again.’

It was one of her brilliant days. She came near to
being happy - and I liked her.

She approved vociferously of the restaurant upon
the plago, its cleanliness, its unaffected simplicity and

224

DOLORES AT TORQUIESTOL

the fishiness of its fish 5 she toyed with the idea of
installing Breton servants in the flat^ she told the
proprietor that she was an Egyptian princess in her
own right, and that Foxfield and I were producing a
book about Brittany in which he would certainly figure
very honourably 5 and later in the town she went some
way towards the purchase of a large salt-water tank
which could be installed in the flat for the closer
supervision of marine morality. But the price and
cost of transport, she decided, was prohibitive.

And so home, leaving Foxfield chuckling heavily as
we receded — he had begun a sort of chuckle soliloquy
to himself after lunch — and obviously puzzled that I
should ever have betrayed discontent with my married
lot.

In the car Dolores relapsed towards fatigue and
intimations of her pain, but revived abruptly to express
her amazement at the fullness of a sea anemone’s life
as Foxfield had expounded it. ‘I thought they were
mere pretty dolls,’ she said.

Also she remarked: ^You publishers underpay men
like Foxfield. What are his opportunities? None! He
is like the great Curie. Who worked all his life in a
shed. . . . Afterwards they were sorry.’

‘Did you talk to him about that?’

‘He wouldn’t talk. He is too loyal to you. But I
could see through him.’

Then in a rapt voice: ‘The things he knows! The
things he might still discover! He makes Nature live.
He goes to the core of things. How dull your talk is in

p 225

APROPOS OF DOLORES

comparison, Steeniej how banal! How English! Never
have you told me anything of all this. If I were a rich
woman I would endow him. Like Rousseau. Like
Catherine the Great and Voltaire.’

‘Damn!’ I said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Only that I went to Roscoff just to get
Foxfield to hurry up with his copy - and from first to
last I never said a word about it.’

§i8

{Torquestol, September \st, 1954)

I have just had an absurd little conversation in the
smoking-room with one of the two English fishermen.
They are English, I find - not Irish. His friend
vanished some three or four days ago. The derelict
was sitting in a corner with his mouth pulled down at
one corner by his pipe, staring at nothing. I felt his
loneliness. I had to speak to him.

‘Your friend has left you?’ I remarked.

He answered resentfully. ‘Gone off to his wife’,
he said. ‘And the fishing was perfect!’

‘Is his wife ill?’

‘Not a bit - not a bit of it.’

‘Married long?’

‘Ages. She’s just making trouble. Couldn’t leave
him in peace. Had to start something.’

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DOLORES AT TORQU^iSTOL

I perceived he was something of a misogynist and
his next remark confirmed this assumption.

‘Marriage/ he said^ ‘is a terrible tie. A terrible

tie.’

He paused there.

‘You’re not married?’ I asked.

‘I have been/ he said, vouchsafing no particulars.
‘I know about it.’

I felt it was for him to go on or break off as it
pleased him. I said no more.

He smoked moodily.

‘It’s curious the way that fellow hangs on to that
woman. As a wife I know her.’

In that case I felt the word was with him.

‘Restless,’ he said. ‘In — cessant.

‘This time it’s a row over a bridge club — libeL . . .
‘Somebody said she cheated or she said somebody
cheated or she cheated. Most of them do, seems to me,
say it or do it. They aren’t happy until the hand’s been
played and the jawbation begins. Anyhow it got put
down in black and white. And here’s this poor chap.
. . . Middle-aged. . . . Nice quiet friendly chap. Got to
go right back in the middle of his vacation. What to?
Crowds of women, all dressed up, all talking at once.
Stand up for his wife’s torts and all that. Quarrel with
his own friends. They’ll drag their husbands in,
willy nilly. . . .

‘And the fishing - perfect J*

After an interval: ‘Just lack of employment.
Surplus ginger.’

227

APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘But why has she never occupied herself with some-
thing more substantial? County council work? Women
can be good administrators. Some sort of study?’

‘They won’t. You know that as well as I do. It’s
bridge and chatter, chatter and bridge — or that
blasted backgammon.’

He seemed particularly hostile to backgammon.

I admitted the general justice of his indictment so
far as middling-well-off women were concerned.

‘They do seem at a loss to find something to do,’
I said. ‘I’m puzzled at times. In Paris, it is the same.
Why this bridge, why this afternoon gadding about?’

‘The afternoon’s the devil,’ he said. ‘They ought
all to be locked in from two to seven. All of ’em. Save
No End of trouble.’

For a time he smoked in silence, looking ineffably
wise and emitting puffs of smoke like an Indian fire
blanket signal. Then he asked me: ‘Have you ever
seen a woman fishing?’

I digested this for a time. ‘It’s a very profound and
extraordinary thought,’ I said, ‘but I never have. Of
course on the Seine, you see Monsieur Dupont and
his wife in a punt - yes. But she — she is either knitting
or reading a novel or fussing with the lunch. It’s true.
They don’t fish. They never fish. I have never seen
a woman by herself with a rod and line — never.’

‘And you never will,’ he said conclusively and
began very slowly to knock out his pipe on the palm of
his hand.

‘That’s women,’ he said, nodded, and left it at that.

228

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

§ 19

So far the lonesome fisherman. Manifestly there
was a personal element in his views. But how far is
his sort of hatred of women, his tone of middle-aged
disillusionment, general among men of his age
nowadays? My range of observation is limited, but I
am inclined to think that under contemporary
conditions many a middle-aged gentleman who
would once have been a great proudly-booming
paterfamilias with a subservient wife, at least an
outwardly subservient wife, and downtrodden sons
and daughters and grandchildren galore, is now in a
resentful unproductive partnership that becomes less
and less refreshing and more and more unmeaning
as the years slip by. Marriage as it used to be involved
the incalculable adventure of children and household^
it was a comprehensive life experience. Now the world
is full of dissatisfied couples with disconnected instincts,
wanting everything in general and nothing in
particular.

We mammals seem to have been evolved for the
wear and tear of breeding, the cares of parentage, and
then physical exhaustion and death. Our teeth are
timed for that. Faced with a contraction of a common
objective, we human beings find ourselves in need of
still imperfectly understood adaptations, and for the
want of them the mutual exasperation of men and
women increases.

229

APROPOS OF DOLORES

His misogyny has for a moment set me inquiring
in a new direction. How far is the antagonism of
Dolores and myself a special case of the contemporary
sex war? Her inborn childlessness merely accentuates
that natural chafing. Perhaps women^ because they
present the ampler aspects of reproduction, find adapta-
tion to current evasions and renunciations more
difficult than men. They have not the same escape
mechanisms as the more experimental male. They are
less cap. ible of that rapt withdrawal from the personal
urgenci3S of life which is typified by fishing. They
cannot abstract themselves with the same ease. I for
example become more and more obsessed by the idea
of an ed' cational and exploratory r61e in life. It has
grown i ito a reasonably consistent philosophy of
service < nd contribution to broad human ends in
which I lose my egotistical prepossessions more and
more. It does not distress me — so far as I am able to
detect what is happening within myself - that I have
no real household. Our home in Paris is a lodging,
which is the least part of a household.

But I do feel a need of companionship. That is
deeper in my make-up. The common interest of a
household did make a mutual companionship possible
under the old conditions. I want someone to laugh
with, one or more congenials, with whom I can air my
opinions freely, people to whom at a pitch one could
turn for intimate help, and I have no intimacy of that
sort at all. Dolores is near to me, as France and
Germany are near to one another, with an armed

2^0

DOLORES AT TORQU^STOL

frontier between us. Whatever I say to her is public
property. And sooner or later it is turned to my hurt.
I cannot relax my egotism to her or anyone, and she
does not want any relaxation of egotism. Which
probably explains why I am writing this diary-
biography.

But because the lives of women are more thrown
back upon themselves by the social dissolution of the
household and more attenuated by that deprivation
than the lives of men, because that household dissolu-
tion is exposing men and women to each other too
barely, turning the natural differences between them
into plain discords, it does not follow that the antagon-
ism of Dolores and myself is merely a special instance
of that. Our essential antagonism is implemented by
that most stupid of all social institutions, the practically
indissoluble childless marriage, so that I am unable to
get away from her, but that merely puts a cutting
edge upon a difference much more profound than the
existing stresses between married people. So far as mere
sex goes there is no trouble between us, except that I
have to go so much away from her to attend to my
essential business. I do not find any echo of Tolstoy’s
Kreutzer Sonata in our relations. Phases of gusto
and disgust do not occur. His, I suspect, was a
melancholic ego-centred temperament lacking in
cheerful elasticity. I do not think that at the root of it
mine is a man-and-woman story at all. It is a story
about two different sorts of people. If Dolores was a
man, racially and culturally different from me, to

231

APROPOS OF DOLORES

whom I was bound by contracts into a close and
complicated business relationship, so that for example
I was senior partner while he was irremovable, the
intensity of the conflict might be less but the shape of it
would be closely similar than the one between Dolores
and myself. He would baffle and entangle me in
much the same way as she does and I should have the
same sort of impotent exasperation.

So I find my way back to my deepening conviction
that Dolores and I are not really female and male of the
same kind, but creatures of a different kind, for whom
any mutuality of understanding is for ever impossible.
There are, I am convinced, by virtue of my own theory,
Wilbeck women in the world and — temperamental
actors, for example - Dolores men.

I have been reading over the stuff I wrote the
other night about the human mdlange. I was muzzy-
minded with brandy and fatigue when I wrote it and
yet I find I am still in agreement with it. I think I
shall leave it just as I wrote it. I thought I was
writing burlesque but if the manner is burlesque the
matter is not. My excursion into slightly alcoholic
dream theories may have been not so much a lapse as
- what shall I call it? - a discovery by relaxation.
Discoveries through relaxation of the attention, do
certainly occur, under hypnotism for example, or
when one works out a problem by sleeping on it.
When I thought I was burlesquing those big socio-
historical books I was really adopting a method which
allowed an accumulation of ideas below the surface of

232

DOLORES AT TORQUESTOL

consciousness to come to the top in a very convenient
manner. This theory that a number of species interlace
in human genetics - parallel to the multiple species
mixed up in the dog world — is just not implausible
enough to be dismissed out of hand. It draws together
a miscellany of notions that have grown out of my talks
with Foxfield and my general biological reading.

I and Dolores are different in kind, just as the
Neanderthaler was different from the Cro-Magnard.
They too may have been able to interbreed. . . .

§2 0

I paused in my writing. A moment ago I was
scribbling calmly. Then I became aware that some-
thing had happened to my desk, something was
missing.

My photograph of Lettice had gone. I found the
torn fragments in my waste-paper basket.

Manifestly Dolores had come to my room in my
absence - pursuing some curiosity of her own. Perhaps
she wanted to know why I spend so much time up here.
I keep this manuscript locked up in my dispatch case
by habit, but there may have been a letter or so lying
about, and there was this photograph. It had stood
against a silly little brass ash jar. Lettice sent it me
three or four days ago. . . .

But this is final. I must have a word with Dolores
and I must have it now.

233

CHAPTER V

THRENODY
{Torquestolj September <indj 1954)

I CANNOT go on with the Case of Stephen Wilheck
contra Dolores^ and I cannot for a very good reason.
It has become unnecessary. Dolores is dead.

This poor being of vanity and crazy spites is dead.

And I am free.

I left her long after midnight. I went to her room
after I had found that torn-up photograph. I scribbled
the last word of the previous section - ^now\ Then for
a time I sat with the scraps of Lettice before me, one
wide-open eye in one bit and a third of the face in
another, and the mouth with one corner missing still
faintly smiling.

'This must stop,’ said I. 'This sort of thing must
stop.’ And I had the fullest realization of my impotence
as I said it.

What could I do? Thrash her? She would brag
about it for ever. It would be a new tie. But what else
was there to do? What good would it be to splutter
fresh protests against her invincible flow of words?

I got up and went with the torn fragments
crumpled in my hand, to her room.

^34

THRENODY

She was awake and waiting for me.

‘Look at that!’ I said, and opened my hand to show
her what I was holding.

‘Yes/ she answered defiantly. ‘Look at that.’

‘I won’t have it.’

‘/ won’t have it. I won’t have that chit of a girl
put in my place. No! Stuck up on your desk there for
everyone to see!’

‘She is my daughter.’

‘She is your mistress.’

‘Dolores, are you mad? Why do you invent this
crazy story? What do you mean by it? What drives
you?’

‘Then why do you make a display of her? Why do
you want her with you? Why do you want to turn me
out of my own apartment — the home I have made, for
- for her?’

‘You know this is a fantastic invention.’

‘I know it is the fantastic truth. Why do you do
such things to me, Steenie? Why are you so hateful to
me? You keep me in a home you desert. You run
about the world.’

‘Nonsense,’ said I, ‘you know I have to run about
the world. You have all you need. You have just the
manage you want, car to your taste, servants to dismiss,
all your gossips. You dress — brilliantly. You lead an
animated life. You tell everything to everybody in
the most brilliant and authoritative manner possible.
All your friends admire you. You admit that yourself.
People turn to look at you in the street. You know

^^35

APROPOS OF DOLORES

as well as I do that Lettice is not with me over there.
I see her hardly at all - not once a month. She’s at her
college and she goes home to Southampton. You
know in your heart you are trumping up this story out
of nothing. Why? Why do you do it?’

She had listened to what I had to say with unusual
patience. She was sitting up now in her bed with
her lean arms clasped about her knees, brooding over
her wrongs. I perceived more clearly than I had ever
done before that her lean and once rather fine face
began to show the wear and tear of much painting
and that the lines about her discontented mouth were
deepening.

‘I hate you,’ she said.

love you and I hate you,’ she amplified. ^Why -
I don’t know. But you - . Have you ever loved me?
Never. I am not blind. You have pretended. Used me.
If you did not love me, why did you take me? I gave
myself to you so recklessly, so freely. . . . ’

I said nothing. I was trying to recall the precise
details of that surrender w’^hile she improvised her
story of her life.

‘You took me - as a stupid child grasps a beautiful
toy. You took me and broke me. Before I met you
I was already celebrated. Yes, celebrated - deny it
though you may. My animation was a matter of
general remark. My abilities. I could write, I could
talk until the whole table was listening to me. Until
everyone else shut up in despair. Everyone talked of
what I might do next. It seemed I might recite -

236

THRENODY

make conferences. A princess. From the land of
Cleopatra. None of your dowdy British royalty about
that! A woman who could dress with infinite chic.
And at the same time a woman of importance in art^
in literature. I had lovers - who loved me. They
really loved me^ Steenie. Nothing was too good for me.
My lightest fancy was law. All life was before me. If
you had supported me, even here in Paris I could have
created a salon. In spite of you. I might have in-
fluenced statesmen. I might have swayed a dictator.
And then - infatuation for you! A caprice yes, to
begin with, but then infatuation. It is like that play of
Shakespeare’s. Yes. You Bottom! You great Bottom!
Bully Bottom. Squatting on me. Insensitive. What
could I do with you? Too stupid even to see the woman
you embraced. With a sneer for all that I said and all
that I was. You have eaten up my youth. You have
wasted my life.’

I remained perfectly still with the torn up photo-
graph gripped in my hand in my pocket.

‘Heavy you are - lout you are. Illiterate in spite
of the books you sell. In spite of the poor authors
you cajole and rob. That poor Foxfield for example -
shabby, uncomplaining. It is not merely that you are
incredibly clumsy and stupid with me. That, I sup-
pose, one must expect from an Englishman and a
tradesman at that. In a way, at first, that amused.
It was - sauce piquante. I liked it - once. Yes. But
there is something evil in you, something perverse.
Gradually, step by step, I am coming to see you as you

237

APROPOS OF DOLORES

are. You have none of my delicacy. Never did you
have a touch of it. This coarse sensualist with a streak
of cruelty blunders his way through all my illusions.
How coarse your face has become recently. Even you
— in your glass - ought to see it. More and more you
are yourself. I hear things. I learn things. I find
out things. Never mind how. I know. Oh yes,
Steenie, I know. You have always been an open book
to me and now you are transparent - perfectly
transparent.

‘But, you said it first, Steenie - this sort of thing
must stop. I’ve been thinking things out — while you
have been louting about up there in your room -
writing on the sly to all your mistresses in England.
Oh yes - 1 know. But I have the logical mind of a
Latin, a Latin sense of reality, and I have my life to
consider. . . .’

(Last night she was saying that.)

‘I have my life to consider. My infatuation for
you is at an end. Fini! Never more will I consider
your wishes, your plans, your well-being. No more
housekeeping for your sake. No more conflicts with
servants in order that you should live in cotton-wool.
That long dream of servitude is past. I cast it aside. I
mean to take care of my own life — from this time
forth. Dolores for Dolores. Clear-headed and resolute
as I am by nature, and now absolutely selfish, a woman
robbed of all illusions. Your work, Steenie. And now
I mean to resume my own career - as your wife,
Steenie, your lawful wedded wife - a hard and brilliant

238

THRENODY

woman. You have suppressed me, kept me out of
the hmehght long enough. I have thought it all out.
Every detail. I shall come to London to that flat
of yours and put things in order there ~ according to
my ideas. Til send your flabby, slovenly, English
servants spinning. I’ll teach your English mistresses
and ^Mar lings” a little straightforward morality.
Society women looking down their noses at a woman
too brilliant for them. I’ll talk to them. ^^Madame”, I
shall say when they telephone to you. ^^This is no
longer a secret flat. Madame Wilbeck is at home to
callers’ ’ . I will give a great cocktail for all of them. Let
them turn up their snub noses at me then if they can.

‘No! Don’t interrupt me, Steenie. I shall only
raise my voice - and then perhaps I shall be sick. I
am telling you calmly what I mean to do. Let me keep
calm. It is no good your protesting and upsetting me.
What I tell you I am going to do, I shall do.’

But I was not interrupting her. I was thinking
about her intensely, for never had she expounded
herself and her impulses so completely before. I was
standing by her bedside as she monologued, watching
her thin flushed profile. It was plainly a premeditated
piece she was repeating. She had been piecing it
together for some time. It was her version of our
relationship. I had seen it growing in her mind. It
was her rationalization of all her moods and impulses.
And as I marked its hard fantastic unreality, I found
myself wondering how far on the other side of veracity
my own version might lie. Not so far as this surely.

»39

APROPOS OF DOLORES

She went on with her declaration of intentions.
She sustained an appearance of implacable determin-
ations. But she was speaking reverie — indulging the
chosen dream of her heart, the pose she liked best.
She was not, I knew, going to do all of this, but I knew
that she might attempt enough of it to become in-
tolerably troublesome.

‘Yes, Steenie,’ she was saying, holding up a long,
thin, crimson-nailed index finger j ‘you are dealing
now with an entirely disillusioned woman. I shall be
unrelenting. Unrelenting. I shall use every one of
my rights against you. You are my husband. Thank
you for that, but do not think I will not use to the
utmost the rights it gives me. Anything you have ever
given me, anything you have ever conceded me, I shall
use against you now. I shall come to London, publicly
and conspicuously. I do not care how rough the cross-
ing is. I can endure it. It is three years now and six
months since I was last in England. I will go every-
where with you. I shall have it announced in The
“after a long stay abroad”. I shall incur debts
for you for all necessary expenditure. I shall see to it
that you are properly watched and reported upon. Yes.
I will send the whole of that harem of yours spinning.
All those women over there shall be dragged out of the
shadows in which you hide them. If they are married
women I shall write to their husbands. What if there
are divorce cases! And as for this nasty daughter of
yours — yes, nasty, nasty, dirty, filthy — off she goes
out of your life! Or else publicity, Steenie. The

240

THRENODY

Englishman’s h^te noire, publicity. I will leave your
blessed flat in style, i will go to Claridges. It is
Claridges they go to$ isn’t it? Anyhow it is one of
those chic hotels. I will see interviewers. The more
you resist the more pitiless I shall be. All London will
talk of you. Obscure as you are I will drag you out of
your obscurity. It will be a stinking case - trust me
for that. Oh, my poor obdurate Steenie! but you have
deserved it. I shall not relent. Stink I will.

‘All this I shall do, Steenie. Ruthlessly. You had
your last chance when you came here. For a day or so,
it seemed almost like early times. And then you must
take part against me with that leper woman who
pretends to be a Baroness, with that mealy-faced
Englishwoman - why doesn’t the fool paint? - with
the servants, with those people who stole our table.
Just as it was with those insupportable Benniels. The
same thing always. Always you are against me,
Steenie. Always!’

She stared before her, brooding for a moment, and
then my immobility compelled her to resume.

‘Always against me. . . .

‘Oh, I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Never yet
have I moved you to passion, to real passion -- never.
If once, if only once in our lives — you had wept! Now
I will get something out of you, some reaction - even
if it is nothing but hate and anger and cruelty. All
this is your doing - all of it. The good in me is ex-
hausted. I have done with love - for ever. Now -
hate! I doubt if I could forgive you now whatever you
Q 241

APROPOS OF DOLORES

did. I am your Enemy. We are at war. I want to ruin
you, Steenie, I want to ruin you — and ruin you I will,
expose and ruin you, whatever it costs me in the
process. I want to hurt you - beyond all things I want
to hurt you.

‘God, how I hate you — Steenie, how I hate you.
If you could see inside my heart, Steenie, even you
would be afraid. Wait till I come back to England.
Wait till I deal with that incestuous degenerate of
yours, that street drab, that filthy, simpering girl, as
she deserves. Couldn’t you see? Even in that photo-
graph . . .’

She was going on in this fashion, almost happily as
these white-hot thoughts came to her, and then
suddenly she stopped short and looked at me. Possibly
it was because I was standing so still. Usually I fretted
under fire or went away. She had to make sure I was
attending. She caught some new quality of menace
in my stillness, and suddenly I saw she was afraid. I
cannot imagine what she found in my face. That too,
I suppose, was impassive.

The abuse died on her lips and she stared at me.
We held each other’s eyes. For a mute moment we
saw each other bare.

Then she changed her expression to one of acute
anguish. She clutched her side. ‘My pain!’ she cried.
‘My pain! Always you give me pain. I can’t bear it.
Oo! Oooh! If only you had it. If only I could give you
a taste of it. You give me black blood, you poison my
blood. And then this pain comes. This terrible pain.

242

THRENODY

Give me some Semondyle^ you brute. Don’t stand
gloating there! You Sadist! Tw^o little tablets, Steenie,
dissolved. Two little tablets. How good that stuff
is! . . .’

She drank.

‘M’m’m. . .

I tilted the glass.

In the morning Marie went to her with her coffee
and found her sprawling athwart her bed. The sheets
were thrown back, and she seemed to be peacefully
asleep. Marie put down the coffee and shook her to
awaken her. But there was no awakening for Dolores.

Then it was that Marie perceived that the little
tube of Semondyle was lying on its side beside the
coffee tray she had just pushed on to the night table.
It was empty and there was an empty tumbler against
the water bottle and the electric lamp.

Marie seems to have taken in these particulars
very exactly, before her feelings rose and she decided
to scream and make a scene of it.

The sommelier who had brought Marie the coffee,
the chambermaid and Monsieur and Madame Hunot
were promptly on the spot, amazed, excited, but
anxious not to alarm the other guests. They shut the
door and made a swift but intensive scrutiny of the
situation. At Madame Hunot’s command they touched
nothing.

243

APROPOS OF DOLORES

Then they came in a discreet brawl along the
passage to summon me. They returned with me to
Dolores’ room like children who follow a Punch and
Judy show in the street. They watched me intently
as I went up to the body, satisfied myself that it was
dead and cold and stood back a little regarding it. I
had, as the cinema people say, registered little or no
emotion for their entertainment, but then I was
English. Marie was the first to break the silence of the
room. ‘Madame was very unhappy last night,’ she
said. ‘She was distressed because M’sieu did not
come to say good-night to her.’

I thought very quickly.

It would save a lot of inquiry and possibly suspicion
if I let it go at that. But then I caught something odd
in Marie’s expression which accelerated my dismissal of
a silly and cowardly impulse.

T did say good-night to her,’ I said. T was almost
certainly the last person with her in this room last
night. I was writing late, Marie, and you had
already gone to bed when I came. It was long after
midnight. ’

There was a faint disappointment in Madame
Hunot’s voice. T heard you,’ she said. She had had a
momentary hope, I think, of saying that later - and
more dramatically.

‘And now,’ I said, ‘you and Monsieur Hunot
probably know best what has to be done. You must
send for a doctor and the commissaire of police. Every-
thing I suppose must be left as it is.’

244

THRENODY

Madame Hunot had telephoned for the commissaire
and the doctor already.

‘Nothing/ said Monsieur Hunot, standing before
the closed door and acting under the prompting of
his wife’s eye, ‘must be known about this in the hotel.
It is the rule. You in particular’ — he addressed Marie
— ‘must keep silence. You must say Madame is
seriously ill — simply that. Not even Monsieur’s
chauffeur must be told. You understand? She is ill.
And you Mathilde? And you Auguste? Not a word.
Complete silence. You Auguste had better go down-
stairs and bring up Monsieurs Dobree and Donadieu
when they arrive. Good.’

He opened the door for Auguste to depart, glanced
out into the passage and shut the door again.

‘This is a great blow to me,’ I said, sitting down.
‘Last night she was alive -her animation was extreme.’

‘I heard her,’ said Madame Hunot.

‘I am stunned.’

‘M’sieu may well be stunned,’ said Monsieur
Hunot.

‘She was always animated,’ said his wife. ‘She was
the most animated and charming woman I have ever
had in this hotel. Monsieur will miss her greatly.’

‘I do not begin to realize,’ I said. I glanced towards
the stiff silent figure on the bed. ‘ That — is so totally
unlike her.’

Several remarks of the same quality, punctuated
by long pauses, ensued. It was a relief for us when
Auguste ushered in the doctor, and still more so, when

245

APROPOS OF DOLORES

the police commissaire set things in action again. Two
nondescripts percolated in the room, unchallenged by
anyone. One I fancy was some sort of police sub-
ordinate and the other because of his notebook was I
suspect the press. But their functions were never
clearly defined.

We were all interrogated. The doctor made his
contribution. The commissaire was a ruddy, white-
fleshed man, badly buttoned up, unshaved and a little
blasd. He dealt with his facts methodically and he was
searching in his manner rather than his matter, when
dealing with me. He walked about the room, he made
nasty little noises to himself and then he would spin
round, finger out, with a question. He tried hard to
fix me to a precise minute for my overnight departure
from the room, being no doubt in search of some
discrepancy with M’me Hunot’s testimony, he asked
the exact time with authority, not to be denied, he
asked it hectoringly, he asked it insidiously and
confidentially, he asked it flatly and unexpectedly and
however he asked it I answered tepidly that I did not
know the exact time 5 then suddenly he gave way to
fatigue and declared he would now seal up the room.

‘Nobody must know,’ said Madame Hunot as we
dispersed on the landing and she put a dramatic finger
on her lips. ‘This is an hotel. The needs of many
people have to be considered . . . Madame is ill and
must not be disturbed. Understand?’

‘Everything goes on as usual,’ said Monsieur Hunot.

A thin melancholy howl came from Marie’s room.

246

THRENODY

She clasped her hands. ‘He knows!’ she said. ‘Poor
Leetle Bayard! Poor innocent! He knows.’

I reflected. I perceived that on account of that howl
I hated the little beast more than ever.

‘Better give him some breakfast/ I said. ‘And take
him out for a run.’

‘You would not like to see eem? He too will be
unhappy. He understands so moch.’

I made no answer.

I came back thoughtfully to this room and sat at
my desk here with my overnight notes before me.

§3

I looked over what I had written overnight and it
seemed the most natural thing to do to lock up this
manuscript, shave and dress, go down for coffee and
then return here and go on writing, I write now by a
sort of inertia. I cannot go into the town and there is
nothing else to do. I want to be on hand if there are
any questions to be answered or any arrangements to
be sanctioned. And also I am getting the situation into
focus very slowly. Certain immediate facts demanded
attention. Beyond that there is the immense shapeless
intimation of an entirely reconditioned life.

And also, something more. . . .

I must set down in the confidence of this manu-
script which I suppose is even less likely to be published
now than when I first embarked upon it, a curious

247

APROPOS OF DOLORES

disturbing thing I have in my mind. I want to get it in
writing even if I have to tear up what I have written
as soon as I have set it down. But I want to get it in
writing now projected before me. It is about that
Semondyle.

Once or twice before I have had dreams so vivid
and prosaic that I have had the utmost difficulty in dis-
tinguishing them from actual memories. Once or twice
facts have thrown a somersault in my memory. And I
am not sure whether at the moment when I should
have put the two tabloids into a glass of water, it did
not occur to me to put in the whole tubeful. It was a
fresh tube, I noted, untouched. ‘If this makes her
sleep for ever,’ I thought, quite calmly.

I remember no emotional colour to that 5 but simply
the quiet acceptance of a reasonable opportunity. If it
happened so, then I felt the gravity of what I had done
so little that I walked back to my own room without
the slightest uncertainty, I did not even wait to see the
result of the overdose and I was not in the least
flustered. I undressed and went to bed and went to
sleep according to my usual routines. All that sounds
improbable. Among other things it does not seem in my
character to make so quick and unqualified a decision.

But was it such a very quick decision? Possibly
I was more prepared for it than that. Even at my
present age I still indulge in reverie. Many people
indulge in reverie all through their lives. I cannot say
how often I may not have had reveries of a wilful
escape from Dolores.

248

THRENODY

There are two definite things that I think count
very much against me. One is that in the morning
when I woke up I had a perfectly clear persuasion that
presently someone would come and tell me that this
thing had happened. Before I knew that Dolores was
dead, I had a very definite conviction that she was
dead.

The second thing that makes me believe that this
affair with the tabloids had a certain element of reality,
is my profound persuasion, and no one could know
better than I, that Dolores would never dream of
surrendering anything she had her grip upon and
least of all the gift of life, without a struggle. Con-
ceivably in the night, in a state between waking and
sleeping, she may have dramatized a scene with me
and threatened suicide after her wont and carried her
histrionics to the pitch of swallowing those tablets,
but even then I think there would have been time to
ring for Marie and have an emetic.

Contrariwise I have on the side of the defence to
consider that queer thread in my own character which
makes it quite possible for me to invent a story against
myself. It is quite possible that my subconsciousness
may have given form to my undeniable discontent
with Dolores in a particularly vivid dream — very
apropos.

Manifestly this is a matter I can confide to nobody.
No court of law is capable of deciding such fine issues as
this involves. Indeed it is something that it would be
unwholesome to brood over very much even within

249

APROPOS OF DOLORES

myself. I mean to dismiss it from my mind. Mean-
while I have to go on with the complicated duties this
catastrophe has thrust upon me.

§4

This is going to be a very long and tedious day for
me. Dolores we have arranged will be removed at
midnight to-night, as secretly as possible, to the
premises of Monsieur Debussy the brother-in-law of
Monsieur Hunot, who will see to the pompe fun^bre.
Until then she remains ‘sealed^ in her room. The
duties do not immediately deploy themselves. After a
certain amount of notification and making appoint-
ments things settle down to a waiting phase. I realize
that my conduct must be determined largely by what
Torqudstol expects of me. I think I had better not
walk beyond the town and that it would become me
best to stand still in front of the Calvary for a time or
sit and muse in the timbered and brightly painted
church. The Baroness seems disposed to waylay me
and I have avoided her with difficulty several times.

My mind sits down in a state of extreme inactivity
before the bare, blank fact that Dolores is dead. It is
difficult to describe how flat that leaves me. However
it has happened, it comes to me as an astounding thing
that it has happened. And I realize, for the first time,
what an immense amount of my mental activities
are arrested by this fact.

250

THRENODY

Continually I have been poising myself against her
for thirteen years and particularly on these excursions
when we have been togetlier, she has been incessantly
present in my mind. I have held my mind always on
the alert for surprises. Always I have been thinking
what will she do next? Now abruptly there is nothing
more that she can do. As Madame Hunot declared
I am going to miss her greatly. I am going to miss her
enormously.

I suppose a man who is unexpectedly cured of some
chronic disease, supposed to be incurable, might find
himself in this same state, a complete disappearance
of a resistance against which he has been thrusting
for years. . . .

My mind refuses to go any further now. This
thing has bludgeoned me.

§5

{Torquistol^ September 1934)

Another enormous day has passed. A number of
necessary formalities have been attended to, I have
answered a monotony of interrogations and made
various arrangements and decisions. It is accepted
that Dolores took an overdose of Semondyle when
half asleep. The question of suicide has not been
raised.

Long ago Dolores, who cultivated a fear of being

251

APROPOS OF DOLORES

buried alive, had extorted a promise from me that I
would have a vein opened before her interment
and for this I have arranged. I have also decided to
have her buried here and to erect one of those heavy
looking Breton crosses of solid granite carved with a
sort of Keltic tracery over her remains. It is to bear
the simple words ‘Dolores, Pax’. The priest here, a
young lean earnest priest, either with the idea of
consoling me or to press a theological point against my
possible scepticism was very urgent for the word
‘Resurgam’. But on the whole I preferred ‘Pax’
simply.

I have got my trusted notary Charles Belot to
come down here from Paris to deal with the landlord,
because the bill on such occasions as this is apt to be
an extraordinary one. The bereaved often feel a
certain indisposition to haggle after a sudden death,
and hotel custom throughout the world has adjusted
itself to that fact. There is something graceless in
disputing an account on the heels of a tragedy.
But your lawyer deals with it in a different spirit.
What has happened to me might very well happen
to some needier holiday-maker and Belot will be
defending not so much my purse as the widow and the
fatherless.

I have arranged to sell the large blue car through
an agent and with some slight difficulty I have parted
from Alphonse. At first he would not take my
decision seriously. ‘I think Madame would have wished
me to continue in your service,’ he said. ‘And she

252

THRENODY

always admired the car — as I kept it.’ I consoled him
a little by giving him his uniform. He assured me he
would always be available if I reconsidered my
decision,

I have given all of Dolores’ wardrobe to Marie,
who took that as a matter of course. She too was a little
disposed to doubt whether I could survive in Paris
without her to keep an eye on me. But I think I can
manage. The flat in Paris I shall dispose of with all
its furniture 5 it is too large for my single needs and
now it will be unbearable. I must have a pied-^-terre
in Paris but I shall arrange things now in my own
austerer fashion.

Bayard perplexed me for a time. He is not what I
should call an endearing dog and his prospects in life
were by no means happy. I thought of giving him to
Marie who has always professed an admiration for him
only second to that of his mistress. But when I
suggested the gift to her, her immediate answer was
that it would cost a small fortune to feed him because
of the delicacy of his stomach, and there was some-
thing so much less than love in her eye as she regarded
our panting problem that suddenly I turned against the
idea. It was borne in upon me that the only proper
place for him, now as ever, was at the feet of his
beloved mistress. I understood for the first time in
my life the sentiments that prompted the people of
the ancient world to make a reverential holocaust of
all the ruler’s favourites when he died. I tried to get
the idea over with the young priest here and the

253

APROPOS OF DOLORES

pharmacist, Monsieur and Madame Hunot and Belot
when he came, and they all, after a little explanation,
seemed to realize the fitness of my proposal. So Bayard
will be put to sleep for ever by the vet to-morrow
morning and buried unostentatiously just outside the
consecrated ground. After all he must be nearly ten
years old and on the verge of obese decay. He would be
unable to keep himself clean and no one now will do
it for him. Marie would be a beast to him. He would
lose his snuffling lordliness — smack by smack. He would
become a stinking apprehensive-eyed little old dog,
less and less capable of not being trodden on. This
best becomes his petty dignity.

To-morrow too Dolores will be laid to rest and my
visit here which began so cheerfully, will come to an
end. I feel extremely undecided about my own
course of action. There is really nothing going on in
London or at Durthing to recall me there now. I had
fixed everything in order until October. Several of my
key men there are taking holidays and the new people
I may want to bring in now will be out of town.
Either I shall return to Paris to dismantle the flat,
go back to England by way of St. Malo or wire to
Lettice to join me at Havre and take her for that
educational tour upon the continent that my imagina-
tion has been planning at the back of my mind for her
for the past year.

254

THRENODY

§6

I have been turning over this manuscript. I do
not know what I shall do with it. Much of it seems
to me now to be hard and unjust to Dolores, and much
could have been told in her favour that does not appear.
But I am loth to destroy it. It is a picture of a relation-
ship even if it is not the portrait of a person. I doubt
if I ought to touch a word of it now. It would lose in
sincerity what it gained in amiability. I think I will
jot down some further descriptions of events here and
then later on complete it or simply end it at this point.
It was begun not as a story but as an essay upon happi-
ness and in spite of this tragic interruption the main
arguments remain.

It will relieve my brain from this wheel that keeps
going round in it, saying over and over again, ‘Dolores
is dead, and what will you do now?^ Let me biologize.

\'\^here was I?

That idea of a multiple heredity in mankind still
seems to me plausibly valid. I want to turn it over a
little more in my mind. Perhaps it is true that what
we call Homo sapiens is a confluence of once divergent
species, but also it may be that it is throwing up new
mutations able to survive, mutations of a mental
rather than of a physically visible sort, some of which
are conceivably better adapted to the new conditions
of human life that are appearing now. There may be
new sorts of people dropping like the first drops of a

^55

APROPOS OF DOLORES

summer shower into the world ~ mixing in with the
old. I want to digest these ideas and experiment in
stating them. . . .

I cannot go on with that - for the present at least.

I find myself feeling abominably lonely here now\
In between these interviews and arrangements and
solemn last duties, I do not know what to do with
myself. I have been so accustomed for the past
thirteen years to subordinate my movements to the
aggressions of Dolores that I seem to have lost the
power of entirely spontaneous movement altogether.
Torqu^stol evidently thinks I ought to lead a sort of
suspended existence, to pace the town rather than
walk about it and avert my eyes from anything in the
least degree amusing. Brittany, we must remember,
takes life in general and death in particular more
seriously than any other province in Europe.

I stalk slowly and gloomily out of the town and it is
only after a walk of a kilometre or more, hands behind
the back and eyes to the ground, that my natural
indisposition to scandalize anybody is satisfied. Then
I brisk up, put my hands in my pockets, whistle and
accost passing birds, sheep, dogs and children. My
craving for companionship is so great that I spent
half an hour yesterday discussing various matters of
biological philosophy with a small shaggy-haired pony
who stuck his head over a gate. He was taciturn but,
I felt, thoroughly sound. He seemed to be as much in
the mood for company as I was.

256

THRENODY

Queer beast you are, I thought; my cousin many
million times removed. Yet bone for bone except for
a canine tooth or so, this long hammer-head of yours
corresponds with mine. Your cranium has a brain, so
like mine that if it were dissected out and put in a
bottle of spirits with its nerves cut off many non-
medical people would guess it was human. Your
cranial nerves, your facial and pneumogastric and all
the rest of them, spread to the very pattern of mine
except for slight differences of scale and proportion
because of this long jowl of yours. They behave, I am
sure, in the same way. You flick your ears with a
vigour I envy, and your bold outstanding eye has an
inspeculative glow far beyond any of my recessed
expressions. And you wear your hair all down your
neck instead of on top like mine. Hence straw hats
for horses. Hairy you are, but you are free to call me
bald-faced; and your cheek and neck were made for
stroking. You are capable of all this frank mute
friendliness, and had I an apple in my pocket for you
our confidence and understanding would be complete.
How far can you go in the way of my perplexities?
‘Such is life,’ you seem to say. ‘Not had in the air and
sunshine.’

On the whole I am inclined to agree. Compared
with me your simplicity is stupendous. You have a
cerebrum, as capable of storing memories as mine and
not so tremendously smaller. But what do you do
with it? Your memory of routes and places is said to
be remarkable by all human standards. Your grey

R 257

APROPOS OF DOLORES

matter is a magnificent big-scale road map. Apart
from that, does it all lie fallow inside there?

You ought to be very teachable. Your brain must
have a wealth of undeveloped regions. How do you
associate your ideas, such as they are? Either you
underwork that brain of yours scandalously or I over-
work mine. I'm all symbols, word-symbols and
complicated intercommunications of which you don’t
begin to have an idea. If your way of linking cell to
cell is like a messenger going from one to the other,
mine is like the telephone exchange of a big city.
If you meet another pony, you see it and smell it and
touch it, whinny and so forth and get your straight-
forward idea of wliat it means to you, but when I
meet another human being or write or telegraph, I
call up a whole world of ideas in a blaze of detail by the
suggestion of a few words. And then more. The
phrases bubble up and multiply like scum in a boiling
pot and in a little while I neither know what the other
people mean to me nor what I mean to myself.
I doubt if you think about yourself at all. You just see,
hear, smell, and feel directly and then you react.
You never think T am’ and still less do you think T
ought to be’.

But I am one of these thinking beasts who have
been afflicting the world and ourselves for the last few
hundred thousand years or so. We have got a new
thinking and co-operating apparatus called language
and in some ways it has proved remarkably efficient.
That is why yoxx are in a paddock and rather bored

258

THRENODY

instead of being out upon a prairie. That is why you
have to stick your head over the top of this gate which
you haven't the wit to open, in order to talk to me.
You stay where you’re put and go where we drive you.
I am in the habit of assuming that we are able to do
this to you by using our brains, but at the back of my
mind there is a curious doubt stirring, whether we do
really use our brains or whether they use us. At times
it seems as though they have usurped control of the
simple apes we used to be. They are very much out
of control. They are for ever nagging us to know
what we are doing with ourselves and with the rest of
you living creatures whose fates are in our hands.
These brains of ours I can assure you won’t leave us
alone. They have taken to inventing things and the
things they invent are often quite unmanageable.
Do you know what it is to have a sleepless night?
Does the man use the brain then or the brain the
man? You may be man-rid, but I am brain-rid. And
as uncertain of the journey ahead.

I put this new idea to my pony something after
that fashion. All we mammals have been accumu-
lating brains quite beyond our immediate needs, we
have accumulated them indeed through our
individual need to survive, but now suddenly with
speech and writing and computation and record and
communications, these brains break out from their
original immediate preoccupations, get into touch,
stimulate one another, react upon and enhance one
another so that now we human beings are all floated

259

APROPOS OF DOLORES

off our private feet and out of our private holes and
corners^ into a sort of common mind, which produces
inventions, novel ideas of conduct, collective guiding
ideas. Our brains have run away with us and seem
to be pooling themselves over us. We cease to be
exclusively ourselves. You are a pony and there your
brain begins and ends, but I am Stephen Wilbeck
mixed up with all those other people past and present
who have given way to ideas. Perhaps you would like
me to tell you more about that. There have been
stages, you must understand, in this usurpation of the
brain, since it woke up from the limited inaggressive
usefulness of your intelligence. One could write a sort
of history of the rise of the Brain Empire in the
Animal World. First the brain discovered individuality
and concentrated itself about itself to produce the
furious egotism of the Dolores stage of human progress
— you will understand that, my dear pony, as well as
anything else I am saying to you - and then secondly
came the realization of a possible collective mind, a
New Deal altogether, and the brain began to launch
these attacks against egotism which we call religion,
science and philosophy. First the evolution of the
conscious brain gathered Homo up into an individual
egotism like a clenched fist, and then it (Nature or
the Life Force or what you will) seemed to realize it
had gone too far and turned upon itself. And so we
have our moral conflict.

And then I told that pony, or else I took it for
granted that he knew, all about Dolores and myself,

260

THRENODY

how incompatible we had been, how we were really of
different species or at least different grades in mental
development, and how my life for thirteen years had
been yoked indissolubly to her inaccessible, irrespon-
sive ego. ^And suddenly/ I said, patting him,
‘suddenly and unreasonably it is over.’

In very much that fashion I thought and even at
times spoke to this friendly pony, patting him ever
and again or stroking his nose softly. ‘And now what
do you think I ought to be doing?’ I said. ‘Forget
about it, eh? Forget those thirteen years? That would
be your way. If I opened this gate for you now, out
you would trot. Leaving the paddock behind you.
Into the open road and down towards the heather
there, clatter clop ~ and Heaven knows what would
happen to you! You’d sniff the air. You’d have a sort
of prancing expectation. But as for the past ! . . .

Well -- my gate is open now. . . .

‘Do they put you in a cart? Do they ride you?
How has your owner broken you in? My brain has
made a responsible wagon for me, which we call a
publishing business, and I dispense knowledge. But
doing that job isn’t all I ask for, I am not completely
subdued to it, and I doubt if you would head at once for
yon cart shed. Something different from that there
would be even in your elementary brain if the gate
came open suddenly. Expectation. Something you
want that will respond to you and make you happy.
You seem as unsuited as I am for loneliness. Which is
why we are hanging over this gate together. ’

261

APROPOS OF DOLORES

And so on. And while I thought and talked
biological nonsense to this pony I found my plans
growing clearer. Now they are quite clear. I shall
leave Torqudstol to-morrow as soon as the funeral is
over. And I shall telegraph for Lattice from Morlaix.
Some human company I must havej someone to bother
me and fill up this vacuum Dolores has left behind her.

I feel strange and rather lost. I do not feel in the
least as a widower might be supposed to feel. I am
thinking very little of Dolores and very much about
myself. My mood is changing slowly, recovering
buoyancy. Yesterday I was completely inert. I felt like
a stone. To-day I feel rather more like a new-laid egg.

As though thus far my life has consisted chiefly in
getting laid. I am looking forward to a personal
future that except for the expanding interest of my
work, persists in remaining entirely blank of intention
or any shape of desire.

§7

{Torquestol, September ^th, 1954)

I have half an hour before I need lock my bags.
Everything is over. On the bed sprawl various
crumpled black garments, about which I suppose I
ought to tell something. Although it is just the sort
of thing I should like to tell about anyone else and
which I hate to tell about myself.

There was, you see, a little crisis at the last
moment, due to an odd negligence on my part. It was

262

THRENODY

a queer little clash between the new world and the old.
I realized my default only when Belot arrived. He
was dressed in black from top to toe, crape round his
bowler hat, black gloves! He carried a small parcel
beside his valise, a black-edged paper bag. An expres-
sion of scandalized dismay spread over his candid
roimd face at the sight of me.

‘Mais M’sieu. Votre deuill’

‘Gods!’ I cried. ‘Of course!’

Here was Torqudstol with every shop with a
shutter up or a blind down, out of respect to my
desolation, and I was going about and had intended to
go to the funeral in a grey tourist suit and a trilby hat.
I looked at my watch and made my plans very rapidly.
‘Twenty-five minutes,’ said I, ‘and we dare not walk
too fast. Come.’

I went in vast wide slow strides so as to get to the
draper’s as quickly as possible while keeping up the
solemnity of the occasion. That at any rate was what
I was trying to do. I felt I undulated. ‘What do you
think we can buy?’ I gasped. Belot being much
shorter than I trotted beside me. ‘I had thought
of a new cravat for M’sieu and gloves! Mais — !’

‘They will have ready-made clothes,’ I said — but
there I was over-hopeful. Torqudstol goes for its
clothes by bus to Chavonet.

Belot was marvellous in the shop. He explained
matters in exactly the right way. ‘M’sieu est devenu
fou de chagrin. Pas de deuil! et le cortbge part dans
une demi-heure! Que faire?’

263

APROPOS OF DOLORES

The little old general dealer was splendid. There
were no difficulties. Nothing but help. But also there
were no clothes. She was swift, excited, but impeccably
funereal and understanding. Everything in the half-
light of the semi-closed shop was done in hushed
undertones or without any words whatever. It was the
most extraordinary prelude to a funeral. Somehow
my worldliness had to be blacked out. A kind of
exaltation was upon us all. She would have a sudden
thought, put a finger on her lips, rush off and reappear
with a large piece of black silk, magnificent black silk.
‘Non?^

Not a black complet in stock? No. Only an assort-
ment of coloured corduroy trousers, gloomily coloured
but still coloured. But surely in some manner the
cloth might be draped about M^sieu and pinned!

I had a bright idea. ‘Monsieur Debussy! Comment
s’appelle cet homme? Fournisseur des pompes funbbres?
A cotd. Peut-6tre aura-t-il des pantalons noirs supple-
mentaires!’

‘Parfait!’ cried Belot. ‘Magnifique!' darted off to
the undertaker’s next door and returned triumphant
in a trice with a large frock coat, a black sash, a tri-
colour sash and trousers enough for an octopod.
These he cast about before me.

‘V’la un choix de pantalons! Monsieur Debussy a
une certaine grandeur, mais - ! ’

But the reserve frock coat of M. Debussy proved
impossibly ample.

Nevertheless the cortege was only five minutes late

264

THRENODY

in Starting and I took my proper place in the procession
in a costume acceptable to Torqudstol standards.
We had got quite a passable Breton hat, a young
buck’s black hat, a modernized towny shape and not
too ample in the brim, and round that after extracting
a rakish grouse feather we had put a band of crape.
Over my waistcoat I wore a sort of soutane overcoat
buttoned about me rather tightly, a loan from the
housekeeper of the young curd^ this was made the more
binding by the black sash, and the pantalons supple-
mentaires concertinaed only very slightly. The
grandeur of M. Debussy was a grandeur largely of the
body and that part of the pantalon could be tucked and
folded away. My brown boots were blackened by
Debussy’s bonne a tout faire with a whole tinful of
blacking. When I had got them on my hands too
were in mourning. Belot proffered gloves - roomy
gloves but they did the job. Time! I took one look at
myself in the shop mirror. I looked an unmitigated
scoundrel. I looked like the villain in a Victorian
melodrama. But I was, it seems, correct. Passably
correct. And there was no going back now.

I reached the hotel just in time to kill a rumour
that I had destroyed myself. Amazement gave place
to intelligent sympathy as a certain oddity about me
was explained. ‘Foude chagrin.’ ‘Lepauvre Monsieur.’
I was guided to my place promptly but very sympa-
thetically. Off we went.

I had to control a strong impulse to bolt. I was out
of breath and in a state of farcical excitement by that

265

APROPOS OF DOLORES

time, but Belot carried on through the whole business
like a court functionary. The more preposterous a
detail, the more correct he made it seem and the more
reassuring were his gestures to me. Should I ever be
able to walk with the grandeur of M. Debussy
pleated about me? Something seemed to be shifting.
I clasped a loose-gloved black hand upon my stomach
as gracefully as possible. Parfait. I walked, stooping
slightly, hand below my heart. My imagination rioted
with what might happen if I withdrew my hand.
If I did so - ? If I bolted. But how could I bolt
entangled in those trousers? I felt the intent gaze of
the bystanders upon me. I resisted the impulse to
provide still further tests for their immense gravity.
It was so fantastic that for a time I crossed the verge
of hysteria. I gasped like one about to sneeze. I met
Belot’s anxious eye, by no means sure of me. I felt
that at any moment I might shout with laughter.
I pulled out my handkerchief with my free hand and
sobbed for breath and then giggled into it. I found my
eyes bedewed. That was better. I sobered down.
I relaxed upon the waist and it still held.

Already as I write I am forgetting these emotional
phases. They are already queer and unaccountable
to me. They are becoming distorted. They do not
flow into one another; they lie like jagged fragments in
my mind. For a time, I know, I felt extravagantly
apologetic to Dolores, ahead there in the coffin. This
ought not to have happened anyhow. I was sincerely
ashamed of myself. I ought to have thought of the

266

THRENODY

mourning. It was so unfair to her, so acutely unfair —
to treat her like this upon her last social occasion.
This comic deuil and all the rest of it was like making
faces behind her defeat. I had been taken by surprise.
Far better the callousness of the grey suit. A crape
brassard would have been more than sufficient. I did
not like doing something she would have hated, which
but for this pitiless immobilization that has seized her,
would have made her thrust the coffin-lid aside and
scream reprisals at me.

Incredible indeed that she was not already sitting
up and sweeping us all away in a torrent of vitupera-
tion. Meanwhile by a sort of inertia the funeral
I knew would go on. Nothing I felt could deflect its
grave inevitability. In Bretagne, however the corpse
behaves, a funeral is a funeral. The idea of Dolores
sitting up and talking at her own funeral cut capers in
my imagination. I began to think of things she might
have said. Tremendous things. I thought of her
expression when her eye caught mine and she saw my
mourning. Was I chic? Was this chic? She who had
always been so chic. I should answer back. A violent
altercation en route. How the devil could one be chic
in trousers like this? She would appeal as ever to the
audience. Did they think a woman of her birth and
breeding should consent to be buried like this? She
would rehearse a fresh version of her autobiography.
Then she would turn to the young curd already rather
puzzled and amazed. . . .

In some such way, if not exactly in that way, my

267

APROPOS OF DOLORES

thoughts misbehaved. I think that suddenly I shouted
‘Hah!’

I clapped my handkerchief to my face and that
second momentary impulse to laughter passed. A
grave little girl w^alking demurely by the side of the
cortege made a prim mental note of this detail of grief
Fanglaise.

My mind turned over. This hysteria was frightful.
It was ugly beyond words. It came to me that it was
extravagantly pitiful Dolores could not cut a figure
at her own interment. Not at all funny. Cruel.
There could never be any more fluent self-explana-
tions, self-vindications for her, now for ever. Hence-
forth she would lose her case by default, in silence.
I thought of her stillness and my heart ached for her.
Poor extravagant Dolores! Whose one outlet of living
has been a torrent of self exposition. She was inside
there gagged, I seemed to hear her: ‘Let me speak,
Steenie, let me speak.’ I wished I could have let her
speak. Maybe it would not have been so very out-
rageous. She was not always outrageous. Her mischiefs
and meannesses went out of the picture. Her passion
to hurt and injure became now merely silly. At times
she had been delightfully absurd. Perhaps I had been
unreasonably impatient with her. After all had any
insult of hers really hurt me? How endearingly
ridiculous she had been at Roscoff. . . .

I began to think of her best moments and to forget
all the rest. Tenderness followed pity. To my utmost
amazement, I wept. I wept simply and genuinely

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for that intolerable woman! And because she was
silent!

By the time we reached the cemetery these crazy
oscillations of mind and nerves were subsiding and
soon I had myself entirely under control. I did all that
was expected of me with apathetic correctitude.

269

CHAPTER VI

LETTICE AND APHRODITE
{Nantes^ September 2^thy 1934)

I FIND that I have not touched this manuscript for three
weeks. While I was at Torquestol everything insisted
on my writings there was nothing else to do. My room
and my speculations about Dolores and happiness and
life generally were a refuge from the deadliest
boredom. I seemed to have done every possible walk
about the place. I took Dolores for excursions but
that did not constitute a whole time job. She spent
some hours on her toilet and she read in bed. There
was my room and there was a desk and there was all
that unavoidable leisure. Anyone might become an
author in such circumstances.

I had to stick it at Torquestol. I had been cheating
Dolores of my presence in France for some time, she
was in a state of nervous disorder and I had deter-
mined to give her a fair four weeks at least of holiday.
My successive entries have recorded how this deter-
mination worked out. I had intended to tranquillize
her indeed, but not so completely as I seem to have
done.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

For the past three weeks I have been going about
with Lettice, but that I will write about presently.
Lettice has recently struck up a friendship with a
small carful of people from the Portsmouth district,
Bunnington the name is, a mother, son and two
daughters whose route has interlaced with oursj
common interests have developed, a standing joke or so
laces their intercourse, and they have, so to speak,
taken her off my hands and gone with her to the
Castle and to the Museum of Beaux Arts. Then they
will lunch at some place starred and recommended
near the river and then do the Cathedral. It seems a
good stiff day of earnest rather than penetrating sight-
seeing they are in for. In the evening I shall dine
with them and send them off to a cinema with my
blessing. This room in this hotel has just the lighting
and furniture conducive to writing. Its chairs are
sympathetic without being soporific. It has an
attractive desk, lit if necessary by a bright, low, shaded
light.

But if so far I have not written since Torqudstol I
have been turning over matters in my mind. And
one or two things have happened — one thing in
particular . . . But that I will come to in its place.
Until it happened and partly dislodged her, Dolores
remained the central reality in my meditations. My
brain insisted upon it. My attempt to distract my
attention by an educational tour of Brittany with
Lettice has proved quite unsuccessful. Nobody could
keep interested in an educational tour with Lettice.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Dolores had an undeniably emphatic personality and
Lettice is by comparison pallid and ineffective^ and
Dolores had thirteen years, and very central years
they were, of my life, in which to make her impression.

Perhaps I shall never have that much intensity of
impression of any human being again. I have known
her close and frank and all ways up and beyond all
pretending. In my exploration of myself and human
life, she has to be my chief material now. My chief
objective material. Perhaps I know her all the more
distinctly because I always to a certain extent disliked
her. Even when I was physically in love with her.
That drew the lines sharper. Marriage flings us poor
human beings under each other’s noses like rabbits
slapped down in a biological laboratory. Only con-
tinually it is the 'Same rabbit. It is moreover a re-
ciprocal rabbit and the dissector also finds himself
dissected. And even after the rabbit has been removed
the mind still works upon its memory.

Let me recapitulate these laboratory notes of mine
and see how I have travelled. I started off at Portumere
with a comparison between extrovert and introvert
minds. I was extrovert and by implication Dolores
was not. But that was right off the mark. I am extro-
vert and introvert as the mood comes or goes, and so was
Dolores. On the whole she was I think more extro-
vert than I.

But while she always related what she saw to
herself as directly as possible, as a child wants to handle
and play with and appropriate anything that attracts

272

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

its notice^ I had a much more elaborate and self-
protective trick of observant detachment. There I
think I arrived at a real difference.

And going on from that I developed an idea of
grades or species of detachment. Was this difference
between us acquired or innate? I tried over the idea
that it was innate, that there were species of mind
with interests so completely concentrated on the con-
scious self that they could do nothing good or bad
without seeing themselves in the centre of the picture,
and other minds without any such complete con-
vergence of reference, so that they could think and
even at times act with complete self-forgetfulness. The
characteristics of these types could be masked or
qualified by culture, but essentially they were innate.

Pursuing our inquiry, said. the professor, we dis-
cussed and dismissed the idea that there was a sexual
difference here. Both sexes may easily misunder-
stand this situation, because the ego-centred man or
woman is likely to strike more vividly and disagreeably
upon the attention of the other sex than the de-
centralized type. Allowing for that, the difference we
are investigating is a specific and not a sexual one.
Ego-centred men and women are in a class together and
so are decentralized men and women.

But whether men or women predominate in
either class is an issue I leave open.

A question that has been exercising me since I
picked up Lettice for this tour, is whether the opposi-
tion of these types has anything to do with moral or

APROPOS OF DOLORES

religious standards. Was Dolores bad and am I goodi
— except maybe for a slight slip with a tube of tabloids.
I ask that question because since we left St. Malo I
have experienced quite a surfeit of churches, crosses,
altars, shrines, calvaries, former convents and saintly
legends. Brittany is a religious country just as Bengal is
a religious country, and its inhabitants are much con-
cerned with the things that are commonly called
‘spirituaB. This ‘spiritual’ is forced upon one.

But what are these things called spiritual? I have
stood or sat as silently as possible and watched almost
immobile solitary praying figures for big fractions of
an hour at a time and tried to fathom what they could
be praying about, I have seen women flitting into
confessionals, watched the priests going with a sort of
shuffling noiselessness about their sacred functions,
seen candles lit and candles extinguished beyond
number, listened to masses, both closely and far off,
heard the organ pealing and the choir boys singing.
I have bought and read various small books of devotion
and several lives of sometimes charming and some-
times perfectly disgusting saints. Spirituality I could
not find in it, only pious magic and a superstitious
materialism. I am left asking has all this religious
business, this so-called spirituality, anything at aU
to do with this fundamental question of the centraliza-
tion or decentralization of the ego?

Most properly grown-up people asked that at f
venture would answer incontinently that it had, tha
here was the clue, if only I would avail myself of it

274

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

to all my questionings. But is it a clue at all? Dolores
for example had a religious phase of some intensity
before she met me. She had thought of taking to the
religious life and becoming the Bride of Christ. But
her craving to be the centre of attention was if any-
thing stimulated rather than subdued by the idea of
taking Heaven by storm. Her devotion did not move
her one jot from her egotism, and as she resented more
and more the entire lack of exclusive reciprocal emo-
tion on the part of the Bridegroom, his spiritual
promiscuity so to speak, she turned her attention to
her confessor. The unfortunate man reciprocated
slightly, kissed her on the forehead, kissed her on the
cheeks and kissed her lips and then repented and
confessed. Which brought her religious career to an
abrupt conclusion.

My interest in religion is that of a complete out-
sider. My father seems to have mislaid his faith early
in his life, and I did not receive the advantage or
disadvantage of definite religious instruction. ‘Bias’
was what my father called it, excluding the issue of
advantage or disadvantage altogether, and his only
definite action in the matter was to warn me
elaborately against what he called the ‘false opposition’
of material and spiritual. He would expatiate upon that
‘unjustifiable distinction between the worldly and the
spiritual — between the flesh and the spirit’ which is
based, he declared, on the rude assumptions of a
primitive physics about substance and essence. There
was, he insisted, even to a rare pitch of emphasis, no such

275

APROPOS OF DOLORES

dualism. Assuming it, he said, was the mental Fall
of Man. It was the key error of our race. Most people
learnt it with language and never suspected the twist
they had been given. Statements without the twist
were simply inexplicable to them.

‘Oh! Beware of that word “spirituary said my
father. ‘It’s a buttered slide. It means nothing and
like all completely empty words, it is a deadly trap for
any but the most wary and penetrating intelligences.
. . . You^ my boy, I warn.’

The older I grow the more I grow up to my father.
I realize that I inherit much more than a well-
organized business from him and that a large part of
what I used to regard as my own personal thinking is
really his insidious heredity. Even my thoughts about
the social functions of the business I realize were also
his. He had never bothered to explain. If I thought
like that I should think like that. Precept would not
help. Except for that fundamental warning.

It was the dream of his life to edit the Epistles of
St. Paul, whom he regarded as the cardinal exponent
of this unfortunate dichotomy in human thought so
far as the western world is concerned.

Since then I have read and re-read St. Paul with
considerable interest^ I have been reading him in the
past three weeks to see how far he was concerned, as I
suspect he was, with just this distinction between ego-
centred and non ego-centred types, how far he was
feeling his way round and about this contrast in human
motivation that has been occupying me. For that is the

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

problem we all come to when our minds grow out of
ready-made clothings the escape from the personal
preoccupation, the ‘body of this death’. More of
us are exercised by it to-day than ever before.

I like St. Paul. I have always liked his mental
quality. There was something conscientiously evasive
about him that I find very congenial. An exploring
mind must not fix itself into over definite phrases.
You cannot say a thing plain until you see it plain.
Once hit in a brain storm by an extravagant idea and
carried away by it, Paul was thereafter very shy of it.
He had jumped to the conclusion that he could re-
habilitate Messianism by associating it with Mithraistic
sacrifice. He had committed the fatal error of trying to
put the new wine of his thoughts into old bottles, into
the old phrases of Messianistic hope and the Mithraists’
blood bath. But he had launched himself upon the
career of an apostle of a revised new faith, from which
it was hard to retreat.

As the first vehement lucidity of his conception of
salvation wore off, he evidently lived a life of intense
brain-searching trying to recover it. The Epistles to
the Galatians, the Hebrews, the Corinthians, are so
plainly discussions with himself. He projects his
doubts as errors in other people and reproves them. I
wish he had been at Torqudstol last month instead of
that misogynist fisherman. We should have argued
with a passionate inconclusiveness.

His ingenious dodging away from any endorse-
ment of bodily and even personal immortality in his

277

APROPOS OF DOLORES

first Epistle to the Corinthians is a perfect example of
that hoodwinking of the passionate inattentive
disciples to which men of our quality are prone. We
have a cowardly dread of destroying their confidence
in us. They settle down so happily in what has been
said and we lack the heart to tell them that on the
long long march towards truth there are still uncounted
miles to go and not alw^ays straight miles at that.
Millions of the faithful must have heard and read that
stuff and believed he was saying the exact opposite of
what he says. How little they have heeded his
metaphors! It has been made part of the burial
service, when feeling overrides thought, but even so-l
His Epistles are indeed an admirable record of
just such intellectual fumblings as ours of to-day.
His riddles are the same. His Old Adam and New Adam
are, I am convinced, my Homo regardant and Homo
rampant^ overlapping one another. But he believed
with obstinate assurance that by some magic of con-
version one could be changed into the other. And that
one was good and the other bad.

That is where I differ from him. It is a question for
judgment and observation. Did he ever know any
human being as exhaustively as I knew Dolores?
Did he know himself as I am beginning to know
myself? Nothing short of Semondyle, I am convinced,
could have released Dolores from her absolute con-
centration upon her ego, and nothing whatever
justifies any belief that I am higher or better in any
way than she was. We were profoundly different 5 that

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

is all. She belonged by nature to a world that is
manifestly working out its own destruction by excesses
of acquisition, assertion and malice, and I, to the best
of my knowledge and belief, belong to a new, less
acutely concentrated world that may or may not be
able to emerge - wriggle out rather than emerge —
from the ruins and survive.

Nevertheless St. Paul, allowing for his times,
allowing for the elementariness of his metaphysics
and his innocence of any biological conceptions what-
ever, allowing for his obsession by politico-social
Messianistic theories and particularly by the brooding
expectation of a Second Coming, was I find a very
congenial intelligence indeed.

And even that Second Coming idea which gave a
form to a widespread realization of the instability of
the Roman Empire, was not in its quality so very
remote from the pervading apprehension we have in
our world to-day, of some imminent vast change -
world revolution, the final war catastrophe, we have no
phrase for it — after which we, too, try to anticipate the
Spirit of Man returning to earth in all its glory. . . .

For no particular reason. . . .

What, after all, is my Way of the World series if
it is not Messianic? Messianic without a Messiah —
or rather with an epidemic of star-begotten New
Adams.

So far as practical vision went St. Paul certainly
saw the world very much as I see it, even if he saw
it from a different standpoint and so interpreted it

^*79

APROPOS OF DOLORES

differently; he argued his thoughts out frankly like a
gentleman, side-stepping a complication now and then
but never denying it; and I am sure if he had been with
us in this little tour we have made from St. Malo to
St. Michel’s Mont and back by Morlaix to Brest and
Plougastel and Quimper and amidst the grizzled elders
of Carnac and M^nec and so hither to Nantes, he would
have gone into the churches with me in an entirely
brotherly fashion and wondered as much as I did,
what all the blue and red timbering and quaint images
— so plainly dedicated to Isis, Star of the Sea, and the
infant Horus, had to do with that taming and con-
trolling of the self-concentrated soul which in spite of
the theological distortions of his mind, is, I insist, the
central problem in his Epistles.

The crucifix he would have recognized and that
would have interested him. But its common use in
exorcism would have puzzled him. His symbol of
man’s resurrection from the carnal self has become a
purely materialistic weapon here, all blood and tears,
a piece of sadistic luck invocation. ‘But the Resur-
rection!' he would have asked. ‘How do they
symbolize that?’

‘Like a gentleman who has just done a conjuring
trick,’ I should say. ‘Up he goes extending demon-
strative hands. After which the meeting, never having
realized any internal need for a resurrection at all,
disperses.’

It would have been worth while to have taken him
to the great calvary at Plougastel and gone over the

280

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

whole legend of Christianity with him there and see
how much of it he recognized. ‘What are these
Gospels you keep quoting?’ he would have said. ‘I
never heard of them.’

I suppose it would offend most Christians beyond
measure to tell them suddenly that St. Paul had never
read the Gospels. Just as it is an outrage to point out
that Shakespeare burlesques him in the most dis-
respectfully familiar manner in Bottom’s speech after
his dream. We never mention it. But I decline to
make Paul a sacred figure. He was too good for that.
If these Christians would only do less reverential
gasping and more intelligent bible-reading, how
much more lucid their minds would be! When
Matthew Arnold tried to make the Anglicans cerebrate
he had to invoke St. Paul. What other of these founder
saints has had the vitality to be contemporary age
after age?

But Plougastel would have made him open his eyes.

I imagine him with his bandy legs apart, a short
and sturdy figure he was, according to that second
century record, the Acts of Paul^ and for the life of me
I cannot resist endowing him with plus-fours, clapping
a golfing cap on his bald head and pulling it down over
his ‘slightly prominent nose’.

‘That is your friend St. Peter,’ I should point out
rather tactlessly. ‘And there you see him again. And
there! . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ he would say, a little impatiently. ‘I see.
I see. I knew Peter. Quite well. Almost the only one

281

APROPOS OF DOLORES

of the Jerusalem group I knew. A very reasonable
man to deal with.’

And his eyes under those confluent eyebrows of his
and under the peak of his cap, would wander in an
unsatisfied search over the stony multitude and at last
come to rest in reproachful inquiry on me.

But there are very few signs of respect for St.
Paul in Brittany. St. Paul when he does turn up —
usually as St. Pol — is St. Paul Aurelian, a magical
Welshman of no intellectual significance whatever.

This green and grey Brittany, this land of softly
rounded granite, is a very old-fashioned land indeed,
dreaming of past enchantments and with no thought
whatever for a new world of things incredible, a
futuristic world which eye hath not seen, nor ear
heard, nor hath it entered yet into the mind of man
to conceive - wherein we shall all be members of one
body - and so forth. These Bretons would almost as
soon subscribe to my Way of the World series as read
St. Paul. He and I are fellow moderns here; both of
us entirely out of this Celtic dream of existence.

But I hear Lettice tripping along the passage to
her room and in a minute or so she will be tapping at
my door.

^Tea-ee/ she will say; ‘Daddly-dear. I want my
tea.’

She has said that quite several times already and I
believe that originally she devised the formula and
intonation for the benefit of George Hoopler.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

^Tea-ee.’

This section is not what I sat down to write at all.

I was going to write about something that has
happened to me quite recently and I have wandered
away from it. St. Paul was the last person I expected
would come into my head. For I had intended to write
about falling in love. I must try again after dinner.

§2

{Nantes, Evening of the Same Day, September 2^thj

1934)

I wonder now why I sent for Lettice.

I think that after Dolores’ death I had a sort of panic
of loneliness. I do not know how it may be with older
people but from the cradle up to the forties at any rate,
the routine of the common day for ordinary human
beings is a series of close contacts with and reactions to
other individuals. Night and day there is this close-
ness for most of us. Nowadays perhaps there is more
sleeping alone than there ever was before, more people
paint or write or study or do their business alone,
thanks largely perhaps to increased lighting and heating
and ampler housing. But instinct is still for intimate
association.

And like all instincts, when this instinct for associa-
tion goes unsatisfied or imperfectly satisfied it conjures
up dreams and reverie. Just as the starving think of

283

APROPOS OF DOLORES

feasts^ and just as lost men in forest and rain conjure
up the vision of a door opening into a lit warm interior.
And it is clear now to me that for some years my
imagination has been making its subtle protests against
the hard intellectualism and business concentrations
of my work in England and the alien circumstances of
my married life. I have established a certain number
of respect-friendships in England^ alliances and co-
operations and so forth, but what this suggestion
corner of my brain, around which the dreams float
and the reveries are born, what it has always pressed me
towards has been something closer, in which miracles
of natural understanding were to be interwoven
inextricably with the incessant contacts of everyday
affairs.

And it was perfectly natural for the reverie factory
in my very normal heterosexual brain to embody this
intimacy in a feminine personality, and for me to
develop the idea of a close and distinctive association
with this lost daughter of mine as soon as the resump-
tion of relations occurred to me. I was romantically
excited about her. I suspect now that most childless
people have exaggerated ideas of the amount of natural
understanding between parents and children. In the
matter of accumulations and discharges of nervous
energy, moods, fits of temper, muscular co-ordinations
and so forth, there may be close affinities in a family,
but acquired habits of behaviour and determining
intellectual forms accumulate so rapidly and are so
independent of heredity as to make that fundamental

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

Stuff between them relatively unimportant. Normal
people are made and not born and gifts and talents
avail little without the co-operation of opportunity.

The story of these last weeks is a comedy of dis-
illusionment. It began with myself on the quay at
St. Malo awaiting the arrival of the Southampton
boat. I stood like a lover, scrutinizing the clustering
little dark figures that were growing by imperceptible
degrees into recognizable human beings. At last one
could distinguish garments and features. And then
suddenly I saw standing up far forward on a seat or
something that raised her above the others, a slender
young woman waving to me, with her black skirts and
her black cloak whipping away from her like the tail
of a half furled flag. My daughter! She was in
mourning! For a moment I was puzzled and then I
remembered. Alice of course had seen to that.

Now I had already seen and talked to this young
woman a score of times and there was no justification
whatever for any illusions about her, and yet so power-
ful was the wish in me that my heart beat fast as I
waved back to her.

She landed. The black gave a gravity to her pretty
youthfulness. She met me with a certain intimation of
sympathetic sadness that passed when we kissed. I
asked about Alice and Hoopler but nothing was said of
Dolores. It was too difficult. There was the black
dress and we drooped a bit and that was that. I guided
her through the easy informalities of the tourist
customs and we lunched in a pleasant restaurant I had

285

APROPOS OF DOLORES

marked down for her, where she squealed suddenly
with delight because everything was ‘so French’. And
then became meek again. I packed her and her
belongings into my car and took her to Mont St.
Michel where I had engaged rooms in the hotel.

‘Lovely!’ she said at the first sight of the mount,
and she continued to say it at intervals along the coast
road and across the sunlit causeway until our reception
at the little hotel. It was quite the right expression.
The sands, the blue sea, the great pile in the warm
afternoon sunlight were at their best and altogether
lovely. We spent the night on the island and walked
out in the moonlight — ‘Lovely’, she said to the moon-
lit sea and ‘Lovely’ to the quite exceptionally good
omelets we were given at dinner - and then we
turned west again by St. Brieuc and Guingamp to
Morlaix with its lovely spiral staircase and its lovely
viaduct. And for four or five days I talked to her, I
talked my best about everything under the sun in the
firm belief that she would presently stop answering me
in single words and break out wonderfully with the
completest response and understanding.

I am trying to recall some of the subjects of that
instructive monologue. I see now that my expectation
of response was fantastic. But my need to feel that
I was imposing some sort of picture of myself, my
purposes and my world on someone, was so strong
then as to blind me to the absurdity of what I was
doing. As I look back upon it I am reminded rather
disagreeably of how I sat jeering silently in the inn

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

garden by the Loire while Dolores expanded herself
for the admiration of Marguerite Benniel within.
The parallelism may not be exact but it is discon-
certingly close. I was certainly under the sway of a
desire to make Lattice into a devoted daughter-disciple.

Among other topics I recall myself discoursing
upouj was the green Celtic world. I tried to imagine
something of that ancient order of things when it was
less dangerous to journey by a little coasting ship than
to travel eastward through the pathless forests and
river swamps and morasses and hostilities and ambushes
of the land. Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and this Breton
country were then all in a thin but very real and
sympathetic community. It spoke what was practically
a common language ^ it had a common culture. Its
saints and apostles came from Wales and Ireland.
Rome had receded to an inaccessible distance and
Jerusalem was in fairy-land. I tried to picture this
forgotten world of the fifth and sixth centuries with
its trading and its coming and going, its Merlin and its
saints and its kings, and how gradually the North-
men from the east, the English and the Normans and
later the French, pressed westward aggressively and
broke up its united isolation. And I talked too of the
widening breach that developed between the English
and the French as the inland roads began to operate so
that the Channel ceased to be a highway and became
relatively a frontier, and of all the invasions and sieges
and sea battles that ensued from that. Gradually as
ships grew stouter and seamanship bolder, the Atlantic

287

APROPOS OF DOLORES

came into the story. I was struck by a realization that
if there had been no Columbus, the men of Devon and
the men of Brittany would still have been in America
in a century or so. There would still have been French
fishermen in Newfoundland and pilgrim fathers in
New England. We overrate Columbus. The Irish
discovered America and made it incredible the way they
told about it 5 Canute’s seamen discovered America 5
the Chinese and Japanese discovered America several
times 5 the Icelanders never knew it was undiscovered 5
America was always being discovered, but the broad
strands of a conclusive contact with North America
spread out from either side of the Manche.

With such thoughts as these I regaled Lettice.

I remember, too, various attempts to picture the
costumes and common events of the past at Mont St.
Michel, St. Malo, St. Brieuc and elsewhere. They
sounded more and more like educational radio talks as
I delivered them. I tried to make the old crowds of
those narrow streets live again, so like ourselves and
so different. All of them driving forward towards old
age and death, but almost completely unaware of any
drift of change as they went about their various
businesses. It is not only perspective that makes their
lives seem little to us. They had no sense of funda-
mental change. They thought their Armorica would
last for ever and it passed; they thought their duke-
dom of Brittany could have no end. The wars of the
French and English seemed to be in the gallant nature
of things, and where is that warfare now? And then

«88

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

I think I said a lot about life and the giant changes
about us and what a great thing it was to be entering
upon life nowadays, when it dawns upon us that we
too may play a part in the unfolding of the future. I
told how life had come to me and opened out before
my eyes. I talked of my expectations and ambitions.
I made reflections and digressions. You have had this
book to read and you must know by now how
abundantly I reflect and digress. I speculated about
what was ahead for me in life and what was ahead for
her. Where should we be in twenty years’ time?
What should we have done then and what should we be
doing?

‘I shall be thirty-nine years old then,’ she said,
making an arithmetical effort. ‘I’ll hate it.’

‘Not so much as you think,’ I said.

And meanwhile the car carried us along through
the clean clear western sunshine, we stopped by the
wayside to pick flowers, we descended for meals and
for churches and menhirs and show places, we watched
fellow travellers, we slept in prim clean little
hotels. . . .

Then my faculty of observation - I first became
aware that the thing was back when we were going
about Morlaix - came on duty again firmly but
unobtrusively. I noted a change in my manner. I was
swinging slowly from a phase of self-expression about
my world and my outlook and the changes and the
meaning of life and so forth to my extrovert phase. I
was becoming aware of what I was doing and the

289

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

absurdity of it. For a time I .went on with the previous
topics very much as before, but now self-consciously,
with an eye on her and with little phrases of provoca-
tion and irony creeping into my discourse. And before
we got to Brest I had ceased to talk at her at all, and
our intercourse varied between long silences, times
when I talked aloud to myself heedless of the effect
upon her, and times when I questioned her and drew
her out sometimes directly and sometimes subtly
about herself.

Never in my life have I had to do wdth such a
recessive conversationalist as Lettice. She has a power
of not seeing, not hearing, not heeding anything about
her, that exercises me enormously. All the time she
seems to be defending some hidden inner life, some
secret system of standards, from the invasion of alien
facts, novel suggestions, additions, extensions. At any
time when she is not actually being called upon for
response, she seems to lapse into reverie. When she is
talked to directly, she has a way of looking thoughtful
and uttering a remarkably useful word, quite new to
me, ‘Urm’. It parries almost anything. It is a com-
plete rejection of further questioning. It signifies,
‘I know enough, thank you’.

She stood out against the sky on a cliff overlooking
Quiberon Bay. ‘There,’ I said, ‘round that headland
Hawke’s fleet appeared and caught the French napping.
Can’t you see them sailing in?’

She looked under her hand at nothing in particular
and said, ‘Urm’.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

‘But the British had a rough time here sixteen
years later.’

‘Urm/ very softly.

‘There has been endless fighting here. Caesar
fought a battle here, galleys against sails.’

She was plainly distressed. She hadn’t another
‘Urm’ in stock. Why drag in Caesar? It was suffi-
ciently difficult to look at this broad scene in the sun-
shine, without plastering it with three layers of in-
visible facts. Probably she felt she ought to look across
the bay a little differently for Caesar and for Hawke
and for the emigres, and she didn’t know how. It was
just the same old sunlit bay. To a multitude of
tourists historical associations must be an unmitigated
nuisance. They are to Lettice. Every sort of associa-
tion seems to bother her. ‘Doesn’t that boat down
there look littleV she remarked suddenly.

‘It is a little boat.’

‘But it looks so teeny, ~ I mean.’

‘It is a way little boats have. Especially when they
are far off. That boat must be a mile away or more.’

‘Urm.’ The effort to take notice and change the
subject had spent itself. She made to descend.

She has an absolute absence df curiosity about the
past or the future or whatever is above or below the
visible things of the present. At first I thought her
tremendous irresponsiveness was due to a need she
might have felt at home to defend herself against
Hoopler’s very difficult style of conversation. But I
found that it is much more than that. She was not

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protecting any living mental process against irrelevance.
She is not so to speak seeing and thinking for herself
and fending off distracting direction and pompous ill-
directed instruction. She is just not seeing or thinking
about external things at all. They are too much for
her. This world which is a feast to me, for her is the
menace of a stupendous indigestion. She says Wo
thank you’ to all of it and reverts to something within.

Only once on this journey have I seen her roused
to a vivid exterior interest. This country is laced with
little old-fashioned light railways which wind about
among the granite hills, and suddenly as I drove along
an undulating lonely road the rocky ground about us
fell away and one of these toy trains of theirs seemed to
come out of the ground beside us a hundred yards or
so away. It appeared trundling along quite noiselessly,
except maybe for some faint rhythm of the wheels. It
came out against the sky. It was a long black single
car and in it were sitting, all quite stiffly, all quite
noiselessly, the black and while Breton passengers.
The three or four immobile men were wearing those
great beribboned felt hats they have^ the women,
caps. Some appeared to be carrying baskets and parcels
on their laps. They travelled alongside us with an air
of predestination. None looked at us. They sat with
an air of vacant preoccupation. They were small and
very clear against the light. They were so different
in quality from the automobile tourist bustle of our
movement that they seemed indeed to be inhabitants of
some different, some elfin world.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

Lettice did get that. 'Oh!' she cried, discovering
them and sat up.

‘Look!’

I looked.

‘Whethy come from? Oh! Whethy come from?’

I thought it best for her imagination to make no
explanations and slowly as our own road mounted
again, the little train was swallowed up by the land-
scape. It sank, it vanished.

‘Whethy gone!’ asked Lettice.

‘Ssh!’ I said mysteriously.

She looked at me questioningly. ‘You’re making
fun,’ she said and twisted herself round and about,
and for a time she was all agog to see that fey train
once more. But it followed the undulations of the land
to its own little Halte and our road went with a hairpin
bend or so over a hill-crest into another valley. We
never saw that little railway again.

At supper that night she said apropos of nothing:

‘I wonder whethy got to.’

‘Who?’

‘All those funny people.’

It is the only time I have ever heard her express
curiosity.

‘Weren’t they funny?’ she said. ‘Coming up like
that out of the ground. I thought it was a perfect
scream. So solemn they all were!’

I have been chary of trying to get at the hidden
core of my daughter Lettice by any direct questioning.
It would be as risky as rattling about with a poker in a

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

dark cupboard to find an egg. But I have remarked
that she is much addicted to sending post-cards. One
now and then to Alice or to an old schoolfellow or so
proclaiming that she is in ‘La Belle France’, that I
could understand, an occasional spray of cheerful
‘Cheeri-os’j but this is the steadfast sending of at least
one card daily to one particular receiver. One evening
she was lost in thought over one of these missives.
She was, I suppose, thinking out some variant of the
customary salutation.

*Is he really worthy of you?’ I asked suddenly.

She examined my expression for a moment, coyly
defensive.

‘You’ve been reading my cards,’ she said reproach-

fully.

‘I’ve been reading your face.’

‘Well, if you’ve found it out, you’ve found it
out. . . . He’s nice.’

‘So that is why you are all in a dream and rather
bored by Brittany, eh? What sort of young man is
he?’

‘He’s clever.’

I had a memory of Alice explaining the high
intellectual quality of Hoopler. There are moments
when Lettice can be extraordinarily like Alice. This
statement of ‘/zw’ cleverness was a defiant assertion
that he was going to rank with me, an anticipation of
any superciliousness on my part.

‘A year or so older than you?’

‘It’s best like that.’

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

‘And you adore him?’

‘I keep him in his place.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s in a shipping office. It’s business about
shipping and freights and all that. They like him
there.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before, Lettice?’

‘I didn’t think you’d care to know somehow.’

‘Does your mother know?’

‘I haven’t told her.’

‘It hasn’t been going on for long?’

She counted with her fingers on the tablecloth.
‘Five months,’ she said.

‘And what does Daddy Hoopler say?’

‘He doesn’t know anything.’

‘And your mother, who knows, though you haven’t
told her, gave you a hint that on the whole, you’d
better not say anything about this to your new adopted
Daddy - for a bit.’

That question troubled her.

‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ she said slowly.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Never mind. Well, I’m
all in sympathy, Lettice. Bless you, my children. If
you don’t love now you never will. It gets harder and
harder the older you grow. Tell me anything you like
to tell me about him. Or not, as you feel disposed.’

‘You are kind, Daddly dear,’ she said looking at
me almost fondly but as though she was not absolutely
certain of my kindness. I smiled at her and patted
her hand on the table and relaxed the tension by

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signalling to the waitress. ‘You must talk to me about
him whenever you feel disposed/ I said. ‘And not
when you don’t.’

‘Of course I can’t help thinking of him.’

‘So natural/ I agreed.

‘All this lovely holiday. Well, I think of him.’

‘You go about and you can’t help imagining - if
perhaps he came round the corner or into the inn. . . .’

‘But how do you know that?’

‘Do I seem very old to you, Lettice?’

‘Oo! nor

‘Well, I can remember going through all that. And
it doesn’t seem so very very long ago.’ I did not foresee
how soon my memory was to be refreshed. ‘You
think,’ I said, ‘ ~ if perhaps he came into this dining-
room now - ’

She looked up in an instant of irrational hope and
then her momentary brightness dulled. ‘And all the
time,’ I said, ‘you know perfectly well he is away
across the sea at Southampton.’

‘Isn’t it sillyV she said.

‘It is how we are made, Lettice 5 it is how we are
made. When does he get his holidays?’

‘Three whole days before I get back,’ said Lettice,
impressively with a sudden desperate hope in her
eyes.

‘We’ll arrange all that, my dear,’ I said. ‘You
should have told me about this before.’ And for the
rest of the evening I was amused by watching Lattice’s
ingenuous efforts to conceal how happy it made her to

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

think that this holiday with me was to be ended three
days earlier than she had supposed. And since then
we have dropped Brittany and history and so forth out
of our scanty conversation altogether.

She is curiously reluctant to mention his name 5 she
prefers the faint mysteriousness of speaking of him as
a Certain Person 5 and she furnishes few definite par-
ticulars about him. But she quotes his opinions at times
and his preferences and dislikes. He seems to be com-
monplace and average to the point of distinction. There
are no signs of poetry or art or adventure or interest
of any sort nor even of any great sensuousness in their
relationship. Their chief excitement seems to be in
just seeing each other, in expecting to see each other,
in seeing each other unexpectedly (that is wonderful),
in hearing about each other from other people. But
maybe there Lettice exercises reserve and, hidden
from me, wonderful and beautiful anticipations pursue
each other through her inturned mind. Yet in that
case, wouldn’t these art galleries we walk through or
the occasional splashes of music we encounter, have
something to say to her to which she would betray
some kind of response? I cannot understand this real
deadness of interest - in anything. Alice was not like
this anyhow. She had a bright eye for the shop-
windows and hoardings of life and got what she could
of what she saw advertised.

I find that every shred of my personal interest in
Lettice has disappeared.

But I hear a sound in the passage of Bunningtons

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

and Lettice returning from their cinema, and I think
I will sally out and make them all have drinks down-
stairs - Ma Bunnington is always rather coy about
taking a nightcap cognac and always does so - before
finally turning in. To-morrow we start for our
respective homes.

And I find that I have not even mentioned the
strange and peculiar experience which I sat down to
tell this afternoon.

I have had a shyness even with myself. It is some-
thing very difficult to tell accurately. I fell in love.
The next time I write in this book I will begin with it
straightaway and avoid all divagations.

§3

(St, MalOj September 50^/1, 1934)

Now, as I promised myself, I will begin in medias

res.

What I have to tell is this. I fell violently in love.
A week ago at an out-of-the-way place called Questom-
bec outside an inn looking upon a quaint little covered
market-house, I astonished myself by this amazing
experience. It happened like a stroke of lightning -
and I tell of it in my own despite. It has left me
crumpled and disconcerted. And yet it is so unsub-
stantial a thing that I find it difficult to tell.

It was on the same day on which we encountered

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these Bunningtons whose tour has been interlacing
with ours now for the past four or five days. I had no
time to write about it in Nantes. I was coming to that
and then the Bunningtons and Lattice returned from
their movie. I digressed too much about St. Paul.
With a sort of subconscious wilfulness I kept on about
St. Paul. I did not know how to break into the topic
that obsessed me. Now I can get the whole business in
perspective - and moreover there is something more
to tell about it that seems to round it off. This evening
Lattice and I are staying in St. Malo instead of in
Dinard, where the Bunningtons are wondering what
has become of us, all on account of that same gust of
passion. But first I must put the Bunningtons into the
picture.

These Bunningtons came opportunely to ease the
gathering tension between Lattice and myself. They
appeared first in the dining-room of some inn before
we came to Quiberon and then they did little more
than look at us curiously and timidly. They were
touring in a car driven by the son. There was a broad-
faced mother in half-mourning, with a general air of
good-humoured geniality, through which ever and
again a calculating watchfulness would gleam un-
expectedly, almost like a bad character peeping out of
the window of a respectable-looking house; there was
a rather jaded-looking son in the middle twenties in a
golfing suit, and two daughters in berets and jerseys,
about nineteen and sixteen. It became evident that
there was trouble between the service which spoke no

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

English, and the son who used that sort of home-made
non-idiomatic French with a restricted vocabulary
which only another Englishman can possibly under-
stand. He was rapidly losing his temper between the
perplexity of the waitress and the not very helpful
promptings of his sisters. I offered my services, which
were eagerly accepted by the mother and rather
grudgingly by the young man.

‘I could do it all right, Mother, if the menoo was
written out properly,’ he said.

‘It’s shockingly written,’ I said, taking it. ‘And
smudged. Probably this waitress here knows less
French than you do. She’d understand Welsh better.’

‘I don’t know Welsh,’ said the young man.

‘Why should you?’ said I.

‘It’s these dialects that put me right off it,’ said the
young man, with declining resentment.

I read them the menu with an affectation of diffi-
culty and occasional pauses for reflection, took their
decisions and transmitted their orders. ‘Can I help
you with the wine?’

‘George says we ought not to mix water with our
wine,’ said the elder sister, evidently reviving a
smouldering controversy.

‘The French do it,’ I said pityingly, and added: ‘At
meals.’

‘But better not?’ appealed George.

I nodded agreement to him confidentially as one
man to another.

I conveyed their instructions to the serving maid.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

‘I’m sure we’re much obliged to you/ said Mrs.
Bunnington. ‘You speak French like a native.’

‘Like a commercial traveller/ I said and returned
to Lettice.

‘Now that’s a nice gentleman/ I heard Mrs.
Bunnington say, none too careful not to be overheard.
‘I wonder who he can be. I don’t know what we should
have done without him.’

‘I’d have managed/ said the son. ‘It’s easy when
you know the ropes.’

But the next morning when his mother and sister
were still in the inn, he did me the honour to take
counsel with me about the roads to Quimperle. ‘It
seems to be a place worth seeing,’ he said and I made
a guarded endorsement. He betrayed uneasiness when
the man in the green baize apron appeared with the
luggage, so I wandered off out of sight so as not to
embarrass him while he packed his car, did his tipping
and started up. They passed me in the little village
street and I was greeted by them all in the most
cordial manner, the son making the car swerve in a
sort of bow to me. I found Lettice sitting at a little
green table on the terrace, waiting for me with a pro-
foundly thoughtful expression on her face.

‘Friendly people,’ I said.

‘Urm,’ she said and brooded for a bit. ‘Daddly-
what relation am I to you really?’

‘Haven’t I kind of adopted you?’ I asked.

‘Urm - but - .’

‘Has that good lady been asking questions?’

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

‘Ye-ess.’

‘She asked, was I your daughter? So I said, Yes.
It seemed easiest. And then she asked, why was I
wearing black. So I thought it best to say that was
for a friend of mine that you didn’t know. So as to
explain you not being in mourning. And then she
asked, was my mother alive? So I said Yes without
thinking and then I said No. I got sort of confused.
So she looked at me for a minute and said, Never mind
telling me if you don’t want to. But you seemed such
a nice gentleman, she said, and with something sad
and lonely about you, and anyhow I must be a great
comfort to you. She was lonely too, she said, some-
times. You be good to him, she said - just as though I
wasn’t. And she kissed me and stared at me for a bit
and kept waving her hand in a kind of meaning way
as the car went off.’

I reflected. ‘No need to bother your head about it,
Lettice. They are going to Quimperle and we are
going inland and then to Nantes. I don’t suppose there
is much chance of our ever seeing them again.’

‘I suppose we shan’t,’ said Lettice, ‘But I thought
I’d tell you.’

‘Best thing to do. But don’t bother yourself.’

‘Only it all seems so silly said Lettice.

Fate however decided we should meet again, and
at Questombec they irrupted just as we were sitting
down to lunch in the little dining-room, and forthwith
they were as people say, all over us. Might they join

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

tables with us? Which way had we come? What had
we seen? How bad and bumpy the roads were and
how thirsty driving made one?

I think that on the whole, in spite of that little
contretemps with Mrs. Bunnington, Lettice was glad
to see them again. She was manifestly getting almost
more bored with me than I was with her. After all I
had mental reserves she did not possess, I could see this
aquatint End of the World country in the most
interesting perspectives, I could pursue my philo-
sophical speculations within myself, I could go on with
my personal problems. For her this tour was like a
discourse delivered in an unknown tongue in front of
a panorama of appearances that were merely ‘foreign^,
queer, non-hilariously ‘funny’ or just silly. But these
other young people established living points of contact
with Lettice almost immediately. Tliey came, it
appeared, from somewhere in the Southampton-
Portsmouth region, called Haslar, and the son either
knew a Certain Person or someone else of the same
name too similar to be easily distinguishable. That
was very remarkable 5 it showed how small the world
is. Bit by bit the identification was established.

But Mrs. Bunnington did not join in their ex-
changes. She sat herself down on my right-hand and
I became aware that she was regarding me with a
marked and peculiar fixity. She had an air of fending
off the general talk from me in order to mesmerize me.
She struggled to make me meet her eye.

She spoke in a low confidential tone. ‘You know,

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

you are one of those people who feel things intensely/

‘And how did you divine thatT I asked.

‘I can see it. And sometimes it would be well for
you to remember that nothing is as bad as it seems.’

‘As a general rule?’ I said, trying to seem intelli-
gently interested.

‘Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.’

‘Now that’s familiar. Who said that?’

‘My husband.’

‘Your husband}, I didn’t imagine — ’

‘Mr. Bunnington was a Mind Healer,’ she said.
‘He began as an Osteopath but afterwards he became a
Mind Healer ~ with Physical Exercises. Perhaps you
do not know. But he was well known. He had a large
practice before he passed over. He had quite a lot of
distinguished men, artists and writers and that sort
of man doing his neck exercises. He taught them to
swan. (!?) Swan, you know - like swans. Swanning
exercises. Some of them swan now quite beautifully.
He was writing a book about it wlien he died.’

As a publisher I felt a slight recoil at this first faint
menace of a manuscript. But for the moment Mrs.
Bunnington was not thinking of publication.

‘Let not your heart be troubled,’ she said, almost
in a whisper of encouragement to me. ‘Neither let it
be afraid.’

‘Was that another of your husband’s — inspirations?’

‘Yes. He had many. But does it mean nothing to
you?’

‘Much,’ I said between mouthfuls,

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

‘I can see you are under a shadow’ - she glanced
at Lettice, but the young people were interested in
their own talk - ‘and I should be so glad to be of Help
to you.’

‘I don’t think I am under a shadow. No. I think I
should feel it if I was. Don’t you? Do you like the
faint flavour of garlic in this salad?’

Slie brought her face closer to mine and regarded
me sideways with her little cunning aggressive eyes.
‘I know better/ she murmured.

‘I never contradict people.’ I moved a little away
from her.

‘I have intuitions. My husband used to say that my
intuitions were often better than his science. Psycliic,
you know. Psychopathic. I can’t help telling you
things about yourself, things that you may not know
yourself. You are under the shadow of a great loss.
Your will is confused.’

‘Did my niece there tell you that?’

‘1 know. I knew.’

I felt I had to get on to the defensive as quickly as
possible. ‘I have a certain reserve about my private
feelings, Mrs. Bunnington - almost - you know - like
wearing clothes.’

‘But when it is a doctor!’

‘When I call in a doctor, that is different,’ I said,
and then the waiter intervened to inaugurate cheese
and dessert.

But Mrs. Bunnington was not so easily repulsed.
She recoiled a little from the attack but only to rally
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APROPOS OF DOLORES

her forces. She resumed with an account of her hus-
band’s remarkable career and practice. He was not,
she said, a very big man physically but he was a very
strong man indeed, of great muscular vigour and per-
fection, he could inflate his chest until he floated ‘in the
sea like a bubble’, and he had come into Healing by
way of being a gymnastic instructor. He had found he
was able to advise people and help people. Gradually
he had come to realize that the body and mind of a
man, in health, were his Supreme Inheritance.

She repeated the phrase with gusto. She pressed it
upon me. She evidently found it good and wanted me
to savour of its full beauty. ‘Man’s Supreme In-
heritance!’

I was tempted to comment. ‘Another of your
husband’s original phrases, I presume? They must
have been extensively quoted. It is certainly true,’ I
remarked, ‘that we inherit ourselves.’

‘It is the greatest truth. But do we heed it?’ she
asked with a rising inflection.

Nothing to say to that.

She resumed her story earnestly. Gradually it had
dawned upon Mr. Bunnington that he possessed the gift
of healing to an unusual degree and that he owed it to
others as well as himself to exercise his gift. He had
begun to appreciate the Psychic Side and that was
where Mrs. Bunnington and her natural Psychic
Gifts had come in. They had worked together. Most
of the illness in the world was due, it seemed, to
mental and physical maladjustment; the mind more

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

often tlian the body was at fault. Of course few people
knew how to breathe properly, few people held them-
selves upright properly, ‘the abdomen particularly’,
said Mrs. Bunnington, and the way they neglected
their necks was shocking. They sat down into their
collars ‘like turtles’. Still these were things the mind
could easily correct. It was in the mind that the great
difficulties lay. ‘Not altogether in the mind, oi
course,’ said Mrs. Bunnington. ‘That is where we
differ from the Christian Scientists. But principally the
mind. . . .’

And so on. And so on. My attention wandered. I
felt like a menagerie animal that is being poked at with
a stick it does not want to notice.

‘That is where you come in. That is why I am
interested in you. An illness of the mind is creeping
on you - while bodily you still seem to be in perfect
health. Some reservation. . . .

‘The want of someone to tell things to. . . . My
husband used to say that was the one good of the con-
fessional. . . .’

I sat and listened inattentively and cracked my
walnuts as loudly as possible. ‘Coffee?’ I asked them
all and said over my shoulder j ‘I will have mine on the
terrasse.’

The Bunnington young people had glanced ever
and again at their mother as she got launched on what
was evidently a familiar topic to them. Then they had
turned again to Lettice and their own fragmentary
talk in undertones. Now at the mention of coffee they

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said, ‘Mr. Wilbeck, what is this Saint’s Leap they talk
about?’

‘An excellent sight,’ I said, addressing Mrs. Bun-
nington in particular. ‘It is something you ought not
to miss. About half a mile through the town to the
old castle and the ravine. So they tell me. An admir-
able after-lunch walk. It is in the Muirhead guide.
Look! You must all go. And meanwhile I will wait
here for you. There is no hurry at all to-day - ’

I stood up and went across the room to the waiter
for the bill. After I had paid I walked out upon the
terrasse without rejoining them and secured possession
of the only chaise longue. But almost immediately
Mrs. Bunnington appeared in pursuit. She drew up a
tin chair that scraped horribly and seated herself
beside me. She seemed primed with a premeditated
discourse.

‘You are going to see the Saint’s Leap?’ I asked.

‘I want to talk to you.'

This was no occasion for half measures. I spoke
with great firmness to her. ‘After lunch,’ I said, ‘it is
my habit to let my mind lie fallow. I smoke a cigar
and I like to smoke it alone. I do not like company in
the afternoon. I think you will be much happier if you
go with the young people.’

There was a slight pause.

‘Of course,’ said Mrs. Bunnington, still genial,
though with a manifest effort and rising slowly from
her chair, ‘if that is how you feel — ’

She stood over me, still slightly incredulous.

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LETTICE AND APMRODITE

‘That afternoon snooze!’ she said by way of a part-
ing shot. ‘Long before you are fifty!’

I did not answer. I had no intention of snoozing.
I motioned her away.

Damn her!

§4

I wonder why I find this sort of quackery so irritat-
ing. Possibly because it seems to me to be making
headway against all the critical and educational forces
I serve. I try not to be impatient, which is the be-
ginning of intolerance. But I ask with a sore mind,
How long must the exploitation of human infantilism
go on? This grand-daughter of Sludge the Medium
would have liked to get all over me, and half believed
in her stuff herself as she unfolded it. It exasperates
me just as Dolores’ trite rantings about personified
races and nations, her deadly caricature of current
politics, used to exasperate me. It exasperates me with
a sense of ineffectiveness. Shall we never make head-
way against this nonsense? Does human nature insist
on it?

My sort of people have done so much to shatter
organized systems of religious and patriotic obsession
that at times it strains my patience to the raving point
to discover that instead of drying up in decent defeat
these dying dragons bleed a spreading and corrosive
juice. Which creeps and increases. I seem to meet
more and more minds discoloured by this superstitious

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

deliquescence. At every level of intelligence I meet
them. The American negro escapes from the artless
Evangelicalism of the camp meeting to fall to Father
Divine, and up and down the scale of culture, the
Fathers Divines, the gurus and guidances, the mind-
healers and psychic confessors seep poisonously through
the world of thought. More and more abundantly.
Mrs. Bunnington is just a middle class specimen. I
suppose there must be hundreds now like her.

So far as I can analyse this — this ooze^ its essential
ingredient is a natural false assumption about life. A
false assumption that holds its own against us, a
Proteus so flexible and persistent that maybe it will
defeat us altogether. This tenacious false assumption
is the belief in Perfection. It changes its shape, it is
here, it is there j it is always the same. Few people get
the full significance of the biological science we talk
about so glibly. They do not realize that it disposes
of any delusions about perfect forms and perfect health.
Underdeveloped minds cling to those — ^ideals\ shall
we call them? The realization that life is and must be
for ever a struggling maladjustment, is too difficult,
discouraging, uncomfortable and frightening for them.
They refuse to believe that that is how they are made^
they think there must be a perfect way somewhere, a
fatuous shiny rightness^ so that, once found, they will
thereafter be able to go through life in a state of
eupeptic invulnerability. Only you see people have
put them wrong about it and so they have missed this
natural perfection.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

I suppose the doctrine of the Fall is the large scale
version of this fantasy of a lost perfection.

And when the Bunningtons of their particular
cultural class come along with patter about the fourth
dimension, the secrets of Tibet, Will and Direction,
and with their marvellous recipes for the perfect life,
breathe down your backbone, digest consciously^ waggle
your abdomen this way and that, never touch meat,
never touch tinned food, eat the peel of your fruit, sit
vacuous for fifteen minutes every day, come and par-
ticipate in my ‘aura’ (for the moderate fee of two
guineas the time) they succumb. Now at last they
have it. Now they too will be and feel perfectly
healthy. If only they believe what guru tells them and
say it over every day, ‘Every day, in every way I get
better and better’ - they get better - and better. The
great secret is theirs. They just drop out of the thin and
wavering, suffering, thinking and fighting line that
still might recondition this foundering world.

Whether they would have been any good in the
fighting line I don’t know. Maybe we might just as
well have left them to the old-fashioned priest before
the old-fashioned altar. . . .

Manifestly the bare thought of Mrs. Bunnington
puts me in a vile temper. It is a flat contradiction of
my existence. It reminds me so plainly that the
majority is by nature and natural disposition against
my sort, and will be for ages yet. Its vanity, its hope,
its will are all against the austere truth. And so
Mrs. Bunnington earns her living and we are in an

3 “

APROPOS OF DOLORES

ineffective minority. To try to get one’s own ideas in
order, let alone those of those people, is to struggle
towards isolation. ... Is it to struggle towards anything
else? . . .

But where am I drifting?

The impudence of trying that stuff on me!

Again — damn her!

§5

I sat smoking outside that Questombec inn dis-
liking Mrs. Bunnington with unusual thoroughness
and no humour in it at all, and wondering why I had
drifted into such intolerable company. What was I
doing, pottering about in Brittany in this fashion with
a mute daughter whose only strong desire seemed to
be to get away from me at the earliest opportunity? I
liked driving my little Voisin car, I was interested by
the sunlit stagnation of this calm backwood country, I
had Dolores and much else to think about and think
out before I returned to Paris and London, yet the
immediate human setting into which I had stuck my-
self seemed extraordinarily ill-chosen and unsatis-
factory. It was with difficulty I recalled the phase of
acute - what shall I say? - lack of detailed stimulation
rather than loneliness, that loneliness panic, which had
made me send for Lettice and anticipate all sorts of
impossible wonderful and companionable things about
her. And after I had got her on my hands inertia had
carried me on.

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

And here I was at Questomhec. The sunlight on
the little old building across the Place and on the
wooded hillside beyond was softly gorgeous. Until
Lettice and the Bunningtons came straggling back,
nothing it seemed could possibly happen.

I reflected upon the general conduct of my life.
Was it by any chance an exceptionally haphazard life?
Not as a whole. No. I had a conception of my life as a
whole, I had a plan, a religion, so to speak, to which I
shaped my mental and business activities, but apart
from that I certainly ate, drank, went about with
people, made engagements, entangled myself, mort-
gaged time and energy with an absence of selection and
precaution and foresiglit that was almost complete.
The casualness of my personal encounters appeared
stark and remarkable before me. Since my birth
people had happened to me and I had made hardly an
effort to control these happenings. My household
arrangements, my associations and companionships,
the atmosphere I breathed, had been none of my de-
signing. I ran over the main lines of my story, Alice,
Dolores, this snatch at Lettice, my clubs and my minor
associations. In the business in London and at Durth-
ing, I did choose people, I weighed them up, watched
them and considered them and promoted or got rid of
them. But for the rest of my existence I steered myself
almost as much as a cork in a cataract.

And - preposterous question for a man of forty-five
to ask! - was this the way most people are living or was
I an exceptional case of sheer heedlessness in a watchful

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

scheming world? How sweepingly human life was
changing about me! In its increasing heedlessness for
example. In the universal decay of prescription.

In the old-fashioned ‘sober’ cellular life of the past
there had been an air of precaution and arrangement —
at least at the prosperous level of living. People con-
fined their intercourse to those to whom they had been
‘introduced’ 5 young people were counselled to be wary
in the choice of friends. You married in your class.
You knew what to expect. The best society behaved
and even misbehaved to pattern. All that sort of thing
I reflected had been breaking down long before the
war$ the war had merely accelerated and completed
the social dissolution. The old classes lost what was
left of their definition and the new sorts of people that
appeared had been too various to develop new ruling
conventions and common ways of behaviour.

I had certainly lived at loose ends and here and
there^ very wilfully^ but I doubted if my detached
manage with Dolores had been anything so very
peculiar by modern standards. More and more of us
are odd men out and odd women out. A hundred
years ago, I told myself^ a man in my case would as a
matter of course have been laboriously huntings
which bored me because I did not ride well — and
which would have bored me even then — shooting
which disgusted me, dining out stiffly, giving dinners —
dinner parties rather - going to ‘the’ opera, ‘the’ play,
decorating a fairly prolific wife with diamonds or
pearls and worrying about a title. Midday at the club.

3H

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

There you had a made world ready for anyone who
escaped from toil and poverty - as ‘made’ as the horses
people trot about on in the Parks - and setting a
pattern to which the hopeful and struggling might
aspire.

But nowadays that old formal world had not so
much died as become an unburied phantom. The
most tenacious thing about it I reflected was the
butler. The stately homes of England were manifestly
astonished at the young people who have inherited
them. The great houses were more and more show
places^ the furniture stood aloof even from its rightful
owners. The Edwardians had startled that furniture
a lot and reinforced it from Tottenham Court Road
but they had kept their clothes on in public. Only the
furniture had known. The new generation kept
nothing on ~ except the butler who would have kept
on anyhow. The new men nowadays - and there were
more and more new men ~ were not assimilated to
anything. The successful business men, I knew, even
the very rich ones, lived in households that were as
much misfits and makeshifts as mine had been, as
much improvisations as mine. And their ladies, those
incalculable female accidents!

Only in a world of people made to pattern was a
stable social life possible. And even then at the price
of endless suppression and hypocrisy. Nowadays we
were all different, there was practically nothing to
prevent our being different, we diverged daily and
went our ways, and with only the vaguest ideas of

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

what we wanted in the nature of associates until they
happened to us. Whereupon we realized that they
were wrong.

Alice of course was not so very wrong. For a natural
young man who could have stayed at home with her
and kept her straight. Alices have happened to endless
men and the association has proved endurable. I had
met her by chance and parted from her because so it
fell out. But in most cases the Alices are not wrong
enough to bring the discord to a crisis. She had been
just normally wrong. Dolores seemed a rarer sort of
discord, but was she? I had tolerated her wrongness
for thirteen years - to the end of her life. She had
invaded me^ she had made the most strenuous efforts
to assert her harsh unloving and unlovely femininity
against me, until at last we had got to a desperate
struggle for the upper hand. How many couples in
the world now were carrying on a similar struggle!
With us our discordance had in the end become stark
and murderous because we had not had the mitigation
of children. But even with children the essential
antagonisms of the casually matched must surely
appear - might even for all I knew become even more
evil, because of the possibility of enlisting those poor
little accidents as auxiliaries in the domestic warfare.
Fantastic paradox it was of human life that we were
in perpetual flight from loneliness and perpetually
seeking relief and escape from the connections that
ensued. . . .

My meditations had reached some such point as this,

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

when I became aware of a young woman approaching
me across the Place, She was tallish, blonde, sunburnt,
hatless, in a light-brown tweed suit that had a peculiar
quality of rightness about it, and her gloveless hands
were stuck in her jacket pockets. She was looking about
her as though something about the Place and the inn
puzzled her and at the same time amused her. She had
a broad forehead above her frank blue eyes, her hair
waved back from it with an unassisted grace and her
lifted chin showed an extremely pretty neck. There
was a touch of warmth in her fairness, it was golden
hair she had, not flaxen, and later when she was nearer
I noted that she had been lightly powdered by the sun
with faint gold freckles. And without doubt and
instantly, I realized that nothing so lovely had ever
come into my life.

She stopped short outside the inn and considered it
for a moment. Then her eyes came down to the
terrasse level and she regarded me with a swift
scrutiny that ended in approval. She seemed to have
a question on her lips. I stood up.

‘You are looking for somebody?’

‘There was a car standing here,’ she said, and her
full low voice was as lovely as the rest of her. ‘There
was a chauffeur. There was an old gentleman. There
was a nurse.’

‘You left them here?’

She surveyed the Place. ‘Unless this town is
twins,’ she said.

‘They have not been here for two hours. Or let us

3»7

APROPOS OF DOLORES

say an hour and three-quarters. I have lunched and
smoked - you see there is not an inch of cigar left.’ I
threw the stump away with the air of a man who pre-
pares for chivalrous action. ‘The only cars are that
ill-mated couple parked over there.’

She glanced at the cars and found they did not help
her problem.

Then a voice came out of the house behind me.
‘Oh^ miss. He’s been so naughty,'

For an instant I thought it might be a personal
denunciation, a most unjustifiable one. I turned and
discovered an English nurse, all white and proper.
But she pointed no accusing finger at me. She spoke
past me to the lovely young woman.

‘He would go to bed.’

The young lady did not seem to be very greatly
shocked. ‘He ought to be spanked,’ she said.

‘You try it, my dear,’ said a second voice and a
cheerful little white-haired old gentleman appeared
behind the nurse. He was small, horsey and fresh-
coloured and he had decidedly handsome features. He
was quite credibly the girl’s grandfather. He seemed
entirely satisfied with himself.

‘I went to bed between sheets,’ he said. ‘I am
always going to do it - every afternoon. Wherever I
am.’

‘Where is Wilkins and the car?’ asked the young
woman of the nurse.

‘He goes off. Oh! - 1 remember. He said some-
thing about oiling something.’

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

The little old gentleman addressed himself to me.
‘A man of over sixty who doesn’t sleep after his lunch
is a fool. I am eighty-two.’

‘You don’t look it/ I said automatically.

‘And if you sleep/ he continued, ‘why not really
sleep? Eh? Why sleep stuffy in your clothes? Why
make a sort of half sleep of it, with your clothes con-
stricting you? Eh? A man who does that at my age is
a fool.’

‘Much more refreshing,’ I said, racking my brains
for some excuse to drag in the young woman.

‘Much. Not the same thing at all. Every day now
I contrive to have a room and get between the sheets.
Every day. They try and prevent it. But’ - triumphant
crow in his voice - ‘I do it.’

‘You wouldn’t like doing it nearly so much if it
didn’t put out Miss Stuart,’ said the young lady.

‘Put her out indeed. She’s just one of these
Dont-ers! Put her out! I wish I could put her out,
confound her!’

Miss Stuart suddenly took it into her head to con-
fide in me by an intimate smile that she wasn’t really
put out at all. She herself had a very agreeable face
and plainly both she and the good-looking young lady
loved that fortunate little old gentleman.

‘Where’s Wilkins, I say? Ah, here he is - just
saving his bacon as usual. Pay the bill, my dear, pay
the bill. Why haven’t you paid the bill? We’ll get
there all right for dinner.’

I saw with helpless exasperation the missing

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Wilkins arrive noiselessly in a large grey Hispano
Suiza. He and the nurse set to work arranging some
cushions — evidently for the old gentleman. And at
the same time the young lady went into the restaurant
with a business-like air to settle her account. I felt
myself intolerably unresourceful. The moments flew
by and I did nothing. At last belatedly and feebly I
said to the old gentleman: ‘Have you far to go?’

‘Twenty. Thirty. I don’t know. Wilkins there
does the sums. We’ve oceans of time. Oceans.’

‘Now, Sir,’ said the nurse.

The young lady gave me a nod and a pleasant
smile. I was so concerned with getting some shadow
of an exchange between us that I did not think of ob-
serving any names or marks of identification at all, I
did not even look at the number plate and in a few
moments the three were tucked in comfortably,
Wilkins was swinging the car round the corner, and
they had gone.

And instantly I was overwhelmed by a sense of
irreparable loss.

I could not endure the thought that they had gone.
It was as though a great light had been extinguished.
The sunshine became just painted sunshine.

They were to arrive in ‘ample time for dinner’.
Now where would that dinner be? I sat down and
opened out my Michelin map. I would not admit the
possibility that some private house might swallow
them up. That was unbearable. I decided they must
be going to La Baule. I had not visited La Baule but

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

I knew it was a fashionable and rather expensive
bathing resort. My best chance of seeing her again
lay in taking up my quarters there and using my
eyes.

‘Z)arf-dly dear/ came the voice of Lettice advancing
across that deserted and empty Place. ‘The Saint’s
Leap was lovely,^

The Bunningtons were all about me.

‘Are you taking the inland road for Nantes?’ asked
the son. T don’t like these minor tracks. I can’t let
her out.^

^We're not going to Nantes/ I said. ‘At least not
directly. We are going to La Baule. Where we can
have a swim perhaps.’

‘But you said you were going to Nantes/ protested
Mrs. Bunnington, quite unabashed.

^ Later I corrected politely. . . .

They went to Nantes and I, for the sake of another
glimpse of a golden young woman^ whose status I did
not know, whose name even I did not know, drove to
La Baule, stayed two nights there, bathed three times,
made Lettice bathe - she swam I found rather well
and I thought the better of her - wandered along the
Esplanade, walked up to the golf links, went into the
Casino, came out of the Casino, went into the Casino
again, prowled to and fro before the Hermitage Hotel,
visited the cocktail bar several times, went peering
round the chairs and tents of the bathers sitting out
upon the beach. It dawned on me that I was behaving
more like a lost dog than a human being and that poor

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Lettice was having as thin a time as a dog whose
owner is trying to lose it.

I pulled myself together. This fantastic thread had
to be cut. T’m tired of this place/ I told Lettice
suddenly, and in the later afternoon we went on to
Nantes and rejoined the Bunningtons at their hotel.
Yet even at Nantes I kept expecting that healthily
slender young figure to appear at every corner. And
that is why I was glad to distract my mind from its
obsession by writing again and why I turned my atten-
tion to an imaginative extension to Brittany of the
Journeyings of St. Paul. And why afterwards I wrote
in such a strain of depreciation about Lettice.

But now to-night — it is already past midnight —
I find I can write the complete story of this strange
aberration of a respectable and public-spirited pub-
lisher.

I have seen my slim goddess again; this afternoon.
And again she has vanished no whither, as goddesses
will.

I was driving along the road from Ploermel to
Dinard. I was driving rather fast because I like to
keep well ahead and out of sight of the Bunningtons.
I have a curious feeling that if the Bunnington car
breaks down, as it always seems likely to do, and I have
to help or pretend to help that ungracious young man ~
and if I find myself with a wrench or the handle of a
jack in my hand — something might happen to make
me lose my self control. I might find irony insufficient
and break his head. Lettice is to take the Southampton

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

boat at St. Malo to-morrow and she wanted to spend
her last night in France at Dinard with these new
friends of hers. I had fallen in with that idea because
of a secret compunction I feel about her, not because
of anything I have done to her but because of my
private criticisms of her. And as we hummed along
the road in the afternoon sunshine a large grey
Hispano Suiza came up from behind us and requested
us in a firm but kindly note, to give way to it. And
there she was passing me!

She was driving. She was doing I suppose about
seventy-five to eighty kilometres, and Wilkins, who
sat beside her, did not appear to be in the least appre-
hensive about it. Her attention, as it should be, was
on the road and she was totally unaware of me. She
passed me.

Whereupon this strange desire for her returned to
me with even greater force than before. Although it
is against all the laws of nature that a rather travelled
Voisin Fourteen should chase and overtake a big
Hispano Suiza, kept in the pink of condition by
Wilkins, nevertheless I set myself to do as much. Wou
are going fasti’ said Lettice.

‘Such a lovely road,’ said I.

But the grey car increased its distance continually.
Now it would be lost in a series of bends. I record that
though I drove fast I was still sane enough not to take
my corners to the public danger. Then down a long
stretch I could see her car ahead going so steadily that
it seemed to be going slowly. It would sink down into

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

the ground and reappear mounting a hill beyond. It
would strike a soft section of road and make itself con-
spicuous by a long roll of dust. Ahead of us was a fork.
The grey car took the road to the right and vanished.

‘That’s Dinard!’ cried Lettice. ‘To the left. I saw
it on the milestone thing.’

‘I know,’ I said, without relaxing. ‘But we’re
going for a little round first. Or else we shall be in
Dinard hours before they overtake us. And I want to
see if the change of date of your ticket in St. Malo is in
order.’

For my guess now was that after dropping grand-
father and nurse, my young divinity was returning to
England via St. Malo. At Questombec I had not even
observed whether the Hispano Suiza had an English or
a French number plate though I had inferred from the
fact that Wilkins was English, that it was probably of
English domicile and register. This time I had re-
tained just enough of my senses to confirm that con-
clusion. The number plate that was ahead of me
carried a big G.B. St. Malo seemed a fairly good
guess, therefore, St. Malo and home. At two turnings
beyond Dinan her dust had subsided and the road was
too traffic-worn to give any indication which road she
took. I did not get out to look. I did not even know the
pattern of her tyres. So under pretence of verifying
some inexplicable point about Lettice’s ticket I went
on to St. Malo, and there I searched the place and
found no sign of the grey car or its driver.

I tried to think out some alternative.

5*4

LETTICE AND APHRODITE

Had she perhaps gone to Parame? She might have
friends staying there. Was Cancale a possible place
for her? I went to Paramd and asked about the grey
car at one or two roadside garages, but they had seen
nothing of it.

‘Are we going to Dinard now?’ asked Lettice.
‘It’s — evening.’

‘I’m getting a little bit doubtful of the way,’ I lied,
and I drove on to Cancale, and came back here in the
twilight at last reluctantly.

By that time Lettice seemed to realize that she
was in the grasp of the incomprehensible and made no
further comments.

I went through a parade of surprise and in-
capacity at discovering what I knew already perfectly
well, that St. Malo is cut off from Dinard by a broad
arm of the sea and that there was no getting the car
across. I did not suggest and Lettice did not think of
suggesting, that we might leave the car on this side
and visit the Bunningtons for that last feast of fellow-
ship by one of the omnibus launches that ply across the
water. And here, therefore, after a final prowl in
search of a large grey car, I am writing about it all
now, and Lettice has gone early to bed so as to be fresh
for the crossing and is, I hope, dreaming of meeting a
Certain Person to-morrow. . . .

And thus in all human probability ends the
astonishing episode of that Lovely Young Woman all
spotted with gold. In notes of exclamation. And I am
left to make what I can of my behaviour.

3^5

APROPOS OF DOLORES

§6

I have tried to tell all this exactly as it has happened
and while it is still fresh in my memory. It cuts
diametrically across the account I have given of myself
thus far and that is why I feel bound to set it down, I
want to see myself in black and white in all my
inconsistency.

What seized me? What was it jerked me like a
hooked fish out of my pose of ironical and indeed
rather sulky self-control? Why did I become suddenly
like a child chasing a sunbeam? What did I really
want? What did I expect?

I cannot sleep to-night and I cannot write properly.
Just this minute I have gone to the window to look out
- for a big grey car in the moonlight in a side street
leading nowhere!

This is a preposterous state of affairs. If I am to
retain control of myself I must think this out - write
it out rather. Why is my brain behaving like this?
What, I repeat, do I really want?

It is, I suppose, a sexual impulse that has flung me
about in this fashion, but it is a very sublimated sexual
impulse. I just want to see more of that lovely thing
and to be with that lovely thing. I want her presence
in my life so vividly, that everything else recedes into
the background and seems by comparison of no im-
portance at all. There is no detail in my desire $ it is
like a desire for a bright glow. (Was I not reproaching

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

Lettice a few pages ago for the exact parallel to this
featureless obsession?) And the curious thing in my
own case is that I do not remember that in my
adolescence or my young manhood^ I ever felt quite
this same concentration upon an individual. I have
known something of desire in the past but nothing
with this exclusive commanding power. Is this how
it takes one as one grows up? It seems against all fact
and reason that desire should be stronger at five and
forty than at five and twenty, but I suppose it is
natural that it should be more selective. This is not
even desire for a womans it seems altogether divorced
from any physical craving, it is a passionate going out
to a particular loveliness for its own sake.

Now is that all that has to be said about it? I think
not. If I try to push this wordless impulsion aside I
do think I can distinguish other things behind it. That
girl is not simply a lovely thing in herself, but she has
caught me in a phase in which everything has con-
spired to throw her up in relief, as a symbol of some-
thing - a lost world in which I might be and am not
living. It is this that has given solidity to the glimpse
of her. Because from first to last all I have had of her
is a glimpse, a suggestion. She came smiling, clothed
in the afternoon sunlight, just as I was deep in self-pity
at my essential and apparently irremediable loneliness.
Just when I was most acutely aware of the frequent
dullness and discordance of my everyday life she came.
Just when I was full of the lucklessness of all my
intimate encounters and particularly of the wasted

527

APROPOS OF DOLORES

years with Dolores. Nothing could have been more
apt.

It was not merely that she drew me by the natural
magic that has made men pursue individual women
since the race began. My pursuit of her was also a
flight, from what I am and what is about me, from my
confusedly frustrated self, to unimaginable things.

In a sense, as a real person, she was never there
at all.

Because - and here I see I am getting at something
~ the truth is that for these past days of distraught be-
haviour I have been in pursuit of a glimpse not of a
human being but of a goddess. That goddess chose to
cast her cestus about a very charming young woman,
but it was the goddess who bewitched me. It was
Aphrodite herself who saw fit to remind me that even
in everyday sunlight, this universe has something pro-
founder and intenser than its everyday events. I per-
ceive I have had as much of a vision as any of the
saints. But of a different divinity.

Quite evidently I shall never see that brave-looking
young woman again. And as evidently it is altogether
imdesirable that I should ever see her again.

Here and now my sanity returns to me and I de-
clare I do not want to see that girl again.

For what would have happened if I had managed to
strike up an acquaintance with these people? Within
a few hours the goddess would have slipped away be-
yond recall and I should have been left talking, very
much in love, no doubt, with a nice limited human

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LETTICE AND APHRODITE

being, at least a score of years my junior, very up-
standing and with very definite and probably very
different ideas of how life had to be lived. Let me face
the facts. That is how it would have been. That
broad forehead and those straight eyes spoke of an
independent reason and will. How far was she edu-
cated? How far had she been ill-educated? And maybe
I should have won her, for love can compel love, and
before we knew where we were we should have begun
that subtle and tortuous conflict of individualities to
which all who belong to the new world are doomed.

We should have married and have had children no
doubt. For to that end it was that old Nature who is
the mother of everything, sent her daughter Aphro-
dite, to lure and intoxicate me. And while my hand-
some young wife had children, I, who was already
twenty years ahead of her, would have gone on working
and my ideas and ambitions would have gone on
growing, while she would have been just sufficiently
handicapped not to keep step with me. I should have
loved her always ^ I am quite sure of that^ and Mother
Nature’s short ends would have been well served^ ten
thousand threads of dearness would have been spun
between us 5 but it would not have been what I was
promised, nor what my heart leapt out to meet in the
Place of Questombec. I should have felt as I saw her
domesticated that I, and Nature, had tricked her, as she
and Nature had tricked me, with something that
blazed gloriously only to vanish. Surely it must be
one of the essential tragedies of the intricate hfe we

329

APROPOS OF DOLORES

lead to-day^ to love a woman still and remember how
once one loved her.

Better I should never have another glimpse of her.

And all the same I want her and my heart frets
at my own rationalization. Wherever I go and what-
ever I do I realize that girl^^ who is really not herself
but the masquerade of an eternal and unattainable
goddess, is going to be just round the corner, just down
the glade, in the next room. . . .

It is already three o’clock in the morning. I shall
have a sleep and then when day has come I shall get
up, take Lettice as I have promised, round the grey
walls of St. Malo and conduct her aboard the South-
ampton boat and kiss her good-bye. And off she will
go three days earlier than the happy young couple
planned, to a Certain Person.

And then - Paris.

33«

CHAPTER VII

RETURN TO EVERYDAY
{Parame, October ist, 1954)

§1

An hotel room in Parame looking out on the sea in
the full tide of the bathing season may seem a strange
place for a man in great perplexity about his life, to
do his thinking in. But it seemed as good as any other
accessible place, unless I turned back and went to
Portumere to talk to Foxfield. But some of this stuff
I want to straighten out in my mind is not quite in
Foxfield’s key. I saw Lettice off yesterday, intending
to go back in the evening to Paris. I started indeed for
Paris and so to speak fell into this hotel. I was full of
discordant ideas and in no mood for driving. I thought
I might as well have things out with myself here as
anywhere.

The background of beach life outside is very
pleasant. I like the softly soughing sea. It is in one of
its bluest moods. Its minute white breakers are almost
exactly in line with the beach. I like the distant
clamour of semi-transparent pink limbed children and
rather opaquer white nurses. I like the little striped

331

APROPOS OF DOLORES

tents. I like the reflections of people on the wet sand.
It is rare one looks out on a scene with so little malice
in it.

§2

What I want to do is to get this sex-beauty drive
and this craving for close and peculiar individual
intimacy that troubles me, into something like a
rational relation to my life as a whole. This spasm of
irrational love is not going to be my last by any means.
I have been rocketing about Brittany, a nascent
widower, remembering Dolores by fits and starts and
then completely forgetting everything about her ex-
cept that I am free from her, and vaguely but in-
ordinately set upon a girl not half my age. Apparently
that particular fever is subsiding - subsiding as inex-
plicably as it arose - evaporating - but now I know my
vulnerability.

It becomes plain to me that for the past thirteen
years Dolores has played the r61e - I can hardly think
of a metaphor — of a zareba, let us say, a zareba of
spiked sounds, against such raids of prowling imagina-
tive passion. Her way of filling that r61e was occasion-
ally ungracious, but now taking the whole situation
together, it seems to me I may have been ungrateful
in not recognizing how her exacting passions and her
passionate jealousy, the distraction of her thorny
clamour, shepherded me to my work and made any
serious divagations impossible.

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But this little affair opens my eyes to my changed
circumstances. Her death is altering me chemically,
and imagination is an endocrinal affair. This sort of
whirlwind is more than likely to spin out in me again.
How am I going to deal with the next one and the next
and the next after that?

Life so far, has happened to me. So I realize. What
do I mean to let happen to me, when again someone
takes on the quality of a commanding loveliness or an
unendurable desire? In a couple of decades or so
these impulses may die down, people say they die
down, but until then they are likely to recur. They
are in the chemistry of my nature, in my blood and
bone. How far am I going to resist them, mitigate
them, cheat them or give way to them? How far can I?
And entangled with this urgency that lurks in my
being and may pounce upon me at any time, deeper
and subtler there stirs a continuing unsatisfied craving
for personal intimacy and association with someone
who must be essentially (and sexually) mine. . . .

Both these sets of urgency are quite explicable as
old Nature’s way of working me up for her chief
concern, it seems, about human life, marriage and
children. But the extravagant growth of the human
brain, the strange accentuation and implementing of
thought by words and symbols, about which I talked
to that pony at Torqu^stol, has outdistanced the barbs
and spurs of Nature, and we find ourselves detaching
her cravings and urgencies more and more definitely
from the ends that justified their evolution. We want

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

loveliness for itself, we want companionship for our-
selves. We see beyond the bait of the trap, we nibble
away most of the bait, and we refuse to be lured and
cheated and to have our hearts frustrated for a mere
biological purpose which we did not clearly foresee.

Old Nature has given neither adult men nor adult
women any natural and enduring instinct for off-
spring or for the toil of sustaining a household, and she
has proved quite unable to prevent our brains running
away with us to remoter interests and strange and
elaborated imaginings. It is old tradition and social
custom that has made men and women submit to the
domesticated life in the past, but how carelessly and
easily they abandon it! And the further they age
beyond adolescence the less easily are they brought
back to it. Old Nature finds herself confronted by
reproachful and horrified statisticians, figures of
falling birthrate in hand, proving her lures and
cheating impotent.

I look into myself and it is plain that if ever now
I have a wife and a household and children it will be
not because I want them directly and simply but out
of some complex of highly intellectualized motives,
duty to society, pride of race, refusal to commit a
biological suicide. It will be an arrangement. I
will marry ^ I will not be married by instinct. If I want
children I will find a woman who wants children. I
dream of a companion and loveliness, but that does
not mean a woman preoccupied with a kitchen and
nursery. I have no emotional desire for children at all,

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but that may be a transitory flatness due to my dis-
appointment with Lettice. I thinkj, however , it is
more than that. I am persuaded that I belong to a
newer kind of human being which comes of age not at
one-and-twenty but after forty and when the pairing
time is over. And also I realize that the accidents of
life have a little cheated me.

The war and my divorce from Alice and my
thirteen years of sterile marriage with Dolores have
made me miss out a natural phase. Possibly for eight
or nine years round about twenty-two for a girl and
round about twenty-eight for a man^ there is an
effective pairing and breeding state of mind, a
‘primary adult’ phase of psychology, I will call it,
which we live through in a decade or so. Old Meredith,
the novelist, realized this. He suggested decennial
marriages thirty years ago. Our world is all too apt to
assume that forty-five has nothing but a slight
numerical difference from twenty-five. But at forty-
five I suggest that an increasing number of people are
primary adults no longer, we are secondary adults,
we have got to a new level, even if as yet we do not
know how to live on it 5 and that naive susceptibility
to desire and tradition has become entangled and
defeated in an intricate network of critical qualifica-
tions and fastidiousness. The instinctive life, which was
once the whole life of man, is now becoming for many
of us only a phase of living. When I was in my teens
there were mates for me by the thousand, when I was
in my twenties there were mates by the hundred,

355

APROPOS OF DOLORES

when I was in the thirties there were still plenty of
mates, but the maturer we are, the less plastic and the
more definite we become. Already the current half-
adult human being, I perceive, does not readily pair.
That fully adult human being towards whom destiny
moves, will not pair at all.

So things seem to me. I think that mentally and
biologically, if not in his physical form, man has been
changing for at least the last two thousand years and
that now he is changing very rapidly indeed. This
New Adam, Homo rampant^ who is dawning upon us,
will be a longer-lived and mentally more consistent
and substantial creature than his emotional myth-
thinking ancestors and brothers. His vision will be
broader and longer and continually less completely
ego-centred. Mutations of my sort, have at the best
but half-emerged to that, we have half-emerged from
a life of vividly self-conscious individuality in com-
paratively small communities (individuality which is
mature at one-and-twenty and of no further accoimt
in the forties) to a life of a broader, more impersonal,
more prolonged and more closely intra-correlated
quahty. Begetting and bearing a family may be only a
pre-adult phase in that ampler life, and for the fully
grown there may be no permanent marrying nor
giving in marriage.

New social institutions may secure the perpetua-
tion of the species quite effectively without centring
themselves upon the cradle in the home. But quite
certainly Mother Nature, who does not care to have

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evolution taken out of her hands, will dissent. She is
dissenting now, and the stress of this conflict of
impulses I find in myself is just her obstinate resistance
to a new order that is passing out of the control of her
slow, cruel hit-or-miss methods. She will see to it that
we are troubled endlessly, and we have to save oixrselves
from her and trick her and assuage her as we can.

Which, to make rather a leap in the argument — for
Nature, interfering as ever, tells me that dinner time
is passing - is why I shall have to harden my mind to
renounce both the idea of a romantic love adventure
that still haunts it, and the hunger for a single close
companion that has always lurked in the background
of my expectations.

There are no such things for me now, there are no
such things. It was just Nature’s playful superfluous
teasing.

§5

I used to think that what I call my ‘work’ was to
save civilization - by a series of publications, an
encyclopaedia or so and the start of an educational
renascence! All these things are necessary by the way,
and they are as much or more than I and my sort can
cope with. ‘One step enough for me,’ says the hymn.
But they axe not going to ‘save Civilization’. Not a
bit of it. They are steps that have to be taken, but they
are not steps towards the salvaging of civilization. (I
forget whose phrase that is 5 it sounds familiar^ one of
my various authors may be responsible, manifestly he
Tf 337

APROPOS OF DOLORES

meant well, but it is not the precise right phrase. It
suggests a sort of rescue of old masters from a burning
country house.)

Civilization as we know it, is not to be salvaged.
It is not worth salvaging. There were some pretty
things about it but its patterns are played out. It
comes to an end — it tears and rends into warfare by
a senile enlargement of its own traditions. All ideas of
stability come to an end in the current decadence. It is
high time it was recognized that we liberal moderns are
salvaging nothing: we are only preparing for some-
thing, something altogether new. Escaping from the
ruins is quite a different business from bolstering
them up.

Man has tried hard to settle down under his own
vine and fig tree for some thousands of years - in
vain. If he is to survive now, plainly he has to drop
this idea of secure sedentariness and turn back to
nomadism, a new, eternally progressive nomadism,
nomadism on a higher level, nomadism not in a
caravan but alone, alone you may say or with all the
world as companion and with all the planet at least as
his wilderness-territory to go wherever he desires.

We, all of us, the most creative, the most pro-
gressive, are merely looking forward as yet to this new
post-human life, the next act in the drama of change.
We get ready for it. That is the general shape of our
Hves.

Before that new nomadism arrives we shall be out
of the way - all our generation - which is just as well

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because j through no fault of his own, that new incessant
nomad would humiliate us into the bitterest hatred
and awaken the heart of malice in all of us. We should
hate the wide strides of his untethered feet. We limp
and hop.

We are, as I say, evolving like amphibians from
one way of hfe to another, our heads emerge into
progress but our hearts respond to tradition. We must
come to terms with our own insufficiency. We find
ourselves in a three-fold quandary between brain,
egotism and heart. Our newly implemented reasoning
powers, under the menace of extinction, urge us to
organize and create^ our ancient irrational instinct is
not for creation and co-operation but for power, it is
far more destructive than constructive^ and what our
poor hearts desire, hardly daring to ask for loveliness,
is the happiness of play and restful entertainment. I
want to look on at life and laugh at it and even love
it a little. Plainly the best recipe for a working
compromise with life must be to obey our reason as
far as we can, play our r61e that is to say, sublimate or
restrain our deep-seated instinct for malicious mischief,
and gratify what we can of our heart’s desire, so far as
and in such manner as, our consciences approve. . . .

§4

To-morrow I head for Paris.

To what do I return? T 9 a completely and de-
Hberately companionless life. And to this ‘work’

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

which I make a sort of justifying refrain to my life.

Whatj after all, does this work of mine amount to?
Let me get down to that.

I am just upon forty-six now and I perceive plainly
that I have never yet worked steadfastly and con-
tinuously at all. I have lived in alternating phases.
My life has been an affair of bright starts and inter-
ruptions and I know now surely that it can never
escape from these fluctuations. It is a hybrid life, torn
in opposite directions. I have imagined that I have
found a sustaining objective in my publishing and
educational work, that thereby I am really helping to
evoke an efficient Mind of Man, and though that is
partly true, partly it is only a consolation fantasy.
I have told myself that I am helping to build an ark
for the human mind, but that ark-building is a
gigantic proposition and I doubt if I am even a
foreman riveter on the immense hull such an ark
needs to be. » * '

The Mind of Man - making a great Ark for the
Mind of Man? These sound preposterously ambitious
phrases and yet how else can I convey my idea of what
mankind needs in order to arrest disintegration and
defeat? This business becomes more and more real
and commanding to me as my life matures, and I
think it is even more foolish to write about it in a tone
of mock incidentalness than to abash myself by
grandiose expressions. Because one is not poet enough
to convey the greatnesis one feels, it does not follow
that the thing one feels is not great. To be nervous and

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apologetic about one’s fundamental beliefs is rather
after the fashion of Mr. Toots and his Tt’s of no
consequence’. This is of consequence. This that I
call my work, my business, is the basic system of my
life, however poorly I may state it and however trivial
my actual performance may be.

‘Ark’ when I reconsider it is rather an unsatisfactory
metaphor. It suggests something shaped, rigid and
final, like a creed or a constitution. ‘Come aboard and
all will be well.’ That misinterprets me. It revives
that notion of ‘salvaging’ something I have been
criticizing. Let me try again to tell myself exactly
what I mean to myself.

I am, I realize, muddy-minded. My mind is not
comprehensive enough and it is too congested by
minor issues and impulsions, to take a clear view of
existence. It is encumbered like a crystal trying to
form in a magma loaded with irrelevant matter. But
nevertheless it has a considerable apprehension of
potentialities. The shape of the crystal, the form of this
world is perceptible to me. It is the common lot to
be muddy-minded 5 I am muddy-minded, you are
muddy-minded, he is muddy- minded ^ past, present and
future indicative you can conjugate it$ nevertheless I
believe, that by getting numbers of people to think as
hard as they can and state as clearly as they can, and
then by bringing their results together, gradually,
steadily, a clearing-up is possible. That clearing-up is
going on even now but it might go on much faster.
Philosophers, teachers, editors and publishers - for I

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

rank all these servers-up of ideas together - should be
the ushers of the crowd. That is what a publisher
should be 5 that is all a sane philosopher pretends to

be. . . .

When a substance which has been loaded and
opaque, crystallizes and becomes clear and definite in its
form, thrusting the alien stuff aside, it is because its
particles have fallen into place one with another.
Nothing new has come, nothing that was not already
there, but only a better arrangement has been made.

I believe that a just general idea of a new life for
mankind is existent - latent - amidst the confusions
of our time, and that as it emerges to lucidity, it will
have compelling power in the measure of its lucidity.
In spite of my experience of Dolores, I do not think
that the average human is incurably perverse.
Malignant, yes, often, but not continually, and
capable moreover in most cases of a certain limited
amount of reversal. As the Right Thing to Do
becomes patent, we shall fall into our r61es. With
much grumbling and whimsicality and resistance no
doubt, and with a dwindling amount of overt and
secret disobedience, but we shall do it. We shall learn
to detect and shoot potential Dictators and that sort of
nuisance, more and more promptly. The mental
atmosphere will be less and less favourable to them.
It is common sense to kill them. It is common sense
that will kill them. Better a blood-bath of dictators
than a single baby blown to pieces. Hurn an life is nt
sixes and sevens to-day and in perpetual danger,

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sim^|y_jj.eca,use it is mentally ill-arranged. To help
set ideas in order is therefore the very best work one
can do in the world. And in oneself. That is my
master idea, my religion and to the best of my poor
ability I subserve my activities to that. Imperfectly
because, as I say, I am imperfectly adapted, a transi-
tional form.

§5

The nature of human intimacy is changing. I
must talk about that to Foxfield when I have a chance.
It is certainly changing from generation to generation.
There will be more better-adjusted people in the next
generation - profiting by our efforts. I am only
beginning to realize that.

The way creatures contact one another can change.
Let me try and explain what I am getting at in that.
How does a dog contact its fellows? Touch, not very
accurate achromatic sight, rich abundant smell, sex
as a transient stormy what else is there that reaches
from dog to dog? Our contacts are fuller than that.
And they are becoming subtler and more abundant.
Ages ago man began to elaborate life by using definite
words. Also he began to clothe and elaborate love. He
became more companionable. By words especially.
Lovers talk and weave a thousand fancies. Words
become the mechanism of a vast abundance of sug-
gestion and enrichment. We smell each other’s minds
in conversation. And man’s eyes also become more

543

APROPOS OF DOLORES

exact. We see with a new precision and discover
beauty. We harmonize. We recede a little from the
elementary contacts in order to achieve other and
wider and lovelier ones. We are reluctant to recede
from those elementary contacts, because of the
extravagant expectations with which they allure us,
but we must. We love the mind that speaks to us in
music, we find beauty in pictures, we respond to the
wisdom or to the caress in a poem. We love the
woman Leonardo loved and writers who were bodily
dead centuries ago live on to stir us. Our contacts
stretch out more and more beyond the here and the
now.

When I was happy in Rennes that first day, the
faint flavour of intimacy with those who had planned
and built the old place was a part of my happiness. My
thanks to them passed like a scarce perceptible enhance-
ment of the evening sunshine. And when I plan and
publish books - or widte this stuff I am writing now -
I do that also for an unseen intimate. Someone whom
I hope I shall never meet to quarrel with, or disappoint,
or experience his or her everyday inadequacy, will
read this. Maybe human intimacy is escaping from the
prison of the present and the visible, the prison of our
current life, unlocking the door but still using the old
cell for sleeping and eating. We’ll still love sights and
sounds and desire pretty people, but lightly and
transitorily, not cruelly and insatiably, and our
invisible tentacles will stretch through time and space
to an altogether deeper and different fellowship.

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A man who sits in a quiet room reading or writing,
listening or thinking, may seem to be solitary and
isolated. But in fact he is in contact with myriads of
intimates. He has a thousand intimacies, each closer
and a thousand times finer than those of a peasant with
his wife or with his dearest boon companions. . . .

So that in reality I am not solitary and I am not
going to be solitary. And if perhaps I feel solitary, the
feeling is a part of my transitionalness. It is because
that pervading common brain, of which I am a
contributory part, has not yet gathered sufficient
substance about me. . .

S6

It was Foxfield who said to me once that conscious
life was ^the thinnest and flimsiest of pellicules,
strained midway between the atoms and the stars'.
Our personalities are by nature and necessity super-
ficial. And incidental. The very saints nod and
forget. Our superficiality and incidentalness seem to
be inescapable. There is no coherent plot for the
personal life 5 there may be no coherent plot for the
whole. That too, like the ego, may be a delusive
simplification. And yet there is something real going
on, something not ourselves that goes on, in spite of our
interpretations and misconceptions. That ultimate
reality behind the curtains may be fundamentally and
irresolvably multiple and intricate and inexplicable,

345

APROPOS OF DOLORES

but it goes on. It may be altogether incompre-
hensible to our utmost faculties, but it is there. And
in some partial and elusive way we are not simply
borne along by that, but we belong. We do not
happen to exist. It is, for inexplicable reasons, our
business to exist.

This I admit is unadulterated mysticism, but I
have never objected to mysticism when it was un-
adulterated. It is when the medicine men try to
conjure with it and sell it in packets that I object.

In this mystery of life there is no simple complete
failure. We lapse but also we can resume. There is
success in every life. It is as inevitable as defeat. Our
essential success is a matter of more or less, and lies
wholly in the way we respond to life. There is no
Heaven for us anywhere, at any tirne^ nevertheless
there are many bright reflections and much amusing
incident upon the surface of being, and there is
loveliness and truth in its substance.

These are not mere words - because words can
be defined by other words. But truth and loveliness
are primary things. . . .

And I think, I think, that the conscience within me
is a primary thing. It speaks out of an impenetrable
darkness but it is real. . . .

I have gone as deeply now as I am ever likely to
go into the riddle of life. If I sat writing here in
Param^ for a year I could add nothing to what I have
already written. I should just sing the same song
with variations, round and round. Indeed is not all

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this book a string of variations on a thread of events?
This now shall be the finale. I know now where I
stand. Stoical agnosticism is the only possible religion
for sane adults. Accept and endme what happens to
you, from within just as much as from without. Do
what is right in yom* own eyes, for there is no other
guide. Go on. Go on to your end. Go on without
either absolutes of beheving or disbelieving, without
extremities either of hope or despair. . . .

§7

{Alengon, October <xnd, 1934)

A beautiful day and I have spent it very pleasantly.
Until the afternoon I remained in Param^, I re-read
this diary of mine and thought and then wrote,
thinking rather than writing, I attempted a sort of
Confession of Faith — a solemn conscientious effort.
Then seized by a sudden restlessness and finding I
wrote no more, I started for Paris.

At any rate I told myself I was starting for Paris.
But I did not take the direct road for Paris. Instead I
motored straight across country to Rennes. I did not
hesitate at any tinmings. I think it was the memory of
that first evening I spent there that made me deflect
my course to the right instead of going straight back.
It was not a long detom. The place had acquired
personality in the retrospect and now it beckoned to
me.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

Rennes, I found, was still Rennes. It came out to
meet me and assimilated me forthwith. But now the
days are shortening and it was all lit up, a sort of
twilight illumination, as if in readiness for me. The
shops were shutting up. The evening was agreeably
warm and the place was full of dim young couples and
dusky movement. It saw to all my needs with the
same cheerful matter-of-fact kindliness of my first
entertainment. The cafe outside the Hotel de Ville
gave me dinner again, I had the same waiter and the
same red-shaded lamp, the band still played in the cafe
on the Vilaine, shut in a little now by glass, and by a
happy chance, the bronze Brittany whom I had always
remembered very pleasantly came down to earth, as it
were, and lived again for me.

But this time I did not keep aloof. I found she was
as simple and gay and friendly as her face. She was
completely extrovert, amused with life and taking
things as she found them. Maybe it will be good to
return to Rennes and that essential sensual innocence
of the seventeenth century ever and again. Maybe it
might be better if men and women never met except
incidentally, and were not obliged by all sorts of
secondary considerations to pursue and enslave each
other. How little they would know about each other,
how freely their imaginations would dance in their duet
and how brightly and lightly they would love each
other! I slept at last very sweetly in Rennes. I slept
late this morning. I was reluctant to leave the place
but I did not want to spoil it by remaining over long.

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I am vsrriting this last note to my book now in the
Paraclete Hotel, Alengon, on the way to settling up my
affairs in Paris. I came on here in the late afternoon,
dining very simply but agreeably, drinking some
excellent claret and avoiding that t6te de veau.

My plans are quiet definite. I am going to dispose
of our apartment and all its chic and oriental furnish-
ings, throw out the Schweitzers, reinstate the Benniels
as my cook and chauffeur in a bachelor flat after my
own heart, and then return to London for a time to
work hard, to work really hard and put things into an
altogether bolder and more definite shape.

I am, I perceive, by all current standards, a moral
pachyderm, for in spite of all that has happened, in
spite of the death of Dolores and loneliness and
futile love impulses and a deepening realization of
my own essential triviality, I find myself emerging
to-day into a state of contentment with Brittany,
myself and the universe.

(‘Mais, M’sieu! votre deuil!’)

Contentment it is, peace of the nerves and steadi-
ness of purpose. The peculiar magic of this road has
not deserted it. I came along it sixty-odd days ago in a
state of hope and elation that was then inexplicable, and
I find myself still remembered. I have seen half of it
now in reverse and it is just as pleasant in reverse and
more golden than ever, a road of complacency and
benediction.

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APROPOS OF DOLORES

§8

Since I started out upon this road my life, my
circumstances, my habits of thought, seem all to
have been made over. How can I estimate the change
as yet? I have found myself out and come to a new
veracity. It is good to have this probable crime
sticking in my mind. I am released not only from the
immense entanglement of Dolores but also from a
certain pedantic private scrupulousness that was half
timidity and indecision, and from what threatened
to become a rather clammy sentimentality about
Lettice. * There was a grain of rightness, a needle
point of penetration, in Dolores’ hostility to that
relationship. How she would have rejoiced at my
absurd disappointment! All that is to the good.

I have, I realize, no sorrow and no remorse what-
ever about the death of Dolores. It has an effect of
being not so much a fact as the sudden removal of a
fact. Even if my curious suspicion about that Semondyle
is justified^ still I have neither regret nor remorse.
If I were to be put back to the moment when I
finished writing about the fisherman and his reflections
upon womankind, and went along to the corridor to
her, would I do it - if I did do it - again?’

I would.

Yes. Even if I did not do it then; now after re-
flection I should certainly do it quite deliberately.
I am happy, I am glad beyond measure to find myself

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free from her and to think that she is free from
herself.

It has turned out so well. There was nothing
more left for Dolores but to go on and on from bad
to worse, getting harder and sharper and viler. No
one could help her. She was damned. She was
Calvinistically damned from the very beginning. She
had already become hke a dust eddy on a sultry day,
no good even as ventilation. She would have made an
incredibly awful old woman. They might have treated
her as a madwoman. She and the world have been
saved that anyhow. I am sorry for her ^ but it is her way
of living I am sorry for and not her dying. She has
ceased from troubling, the fever of her appetites is
appeased, her insatiable boasting perishes with her, she
sleeps and now she will hurt and be hurt no more.

In the case of Stephen Wilbeck versus Dolores I
condemn both parties, with a recommendation to
mercy. Each had a wicked heart and if she was an
uncontrollable scream, he was a deadly self-protective
companion for her. If she was pseudo-oriental and
addicted to every extremity of emotional exaggeration,
he had a heart as cold as it was light. It was easy for
him to turn away to that ‘work’ of his - which you
will note has changed considerably in the telling as his
tale has unfolded. He liked many things in her and he
owed a considerable stimulation to her. That he would
have admitted if she had let him.

In the serenity of another world, some still dream-
world of motionless skies and *tall rocks and trees and

351

APROPOS OF DOLORES

mirroring lakes, we two people might even come to
condone one another.

In passing, that is. If we went into particxdars the
old sores would reopen.

Soon the still lakes would be rufQed by catspaws.
The motionless skies and trees would be troubled, they
would begin to sway about, clouds would gather
and leaves fall. There would be uneasy sounds
everywhere where silence had reigned. ... ^

In the distance I should hear Bayard yapping once
again. I should hear the old life reassembling itself.

THE END

553